THE 2011 JUNO AWARDS nominee compilation album is a non-profit package with proceeds going
to MusiCounts, Canadaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s music education charity associated with CARAS; MusiCounts is dedicated to
keeping music alive in schools through Band Aid music instrument grants, scholarships and by
honouring extraordinary music teachers.

AVAILABLE MARCH 8TH
...WATCH THEM LIVE
MARCH 27 on CTV

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Hit the Road with Music From…

LUCINDA WILLIAMS
Blessed

HAYES CARLL
KMAG YOYO

Considered by many to be one of America’s
greatest living songwriters, 3 time Grammy Award
Winner Lucinda Williams lives up to that and
more by delivering 12 new songs that cover an
even wider emotional spectrum than her previous
work, without moving too far in any one direction.
Deluxe edition features second disc “The Kitchen
Tapes,” where she does most of her writing. It
features all the songs from the first disc in demo
form as recorded in her kitchen.

“If you’ve been waiting for Ryan Adams to put Whiskeytown
back together, welcome!” - Washington Post
“…a familiar type-a mushmouthed drawler who’s smarter
about the beat, than his shambling ways would make you
think, and funnier than shit when he wants to be, which is
often.” - Blender
www.hayescarll.com

BLACK JOE LEWIS &
THE HONEYBEARS
Scandalous
11 new songs with a modern and gritty take on classic
funk, soul, rock and blues.
Album Available March 15th.
Be sure to catch Black Joe Lewis live in concert at
The Horsehoe Tavern in Toronto on March 31st.
www.blackjoelewis.com

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RYAN BINGHAM
Junky Star*

BLACK JOE LEWIS & THE HONEYBEARS
Tell ‘em What Your Name Is!*

LUCINDA WILLIAMS
Car Wheels On A Gravel Road*

JOHNNY CASH
American VI: Ain’t No Grave*

HAYES CARLL
Trouble In Mind*

TOM JONES
Praise & Blame*

$10

On Sale Now at

ea. CD*

RYAN ADAMS AND THE CARDINALS
Cold Roses*

Quantities limited.
Sale in effect until March 31, 2011 at all Sunrise Records
stores while supplies last.
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Canadian electropop squad
These Kids Wear Crowns are ready
to make it reign / by Karen Bliss
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J

umpstart is the perfect title and lead single

for These Kids Wear Crowns’ debut studio
album, considering it was MuchMusic’s disBAND reality show, which gave the Chilliwack, BC electro dance-pop band major exposure and led to its recording contract with
EMI Music Canada. It gave the sextet a jumpstart,
yes, but it’s not like they hadn’t put in the work long
before then.

“We’re gonna give it a jumpstart / 4,3,2,1,
go! / What’s up? / When we get it going no
way we’re gonna stop / And all you need is
a spark, spark / If it’s all that you got! Got,
got, got, got / We’re gonna give it a jumpstart
/ 4,3,2,1, go!” sings frontman Alex Johnson
in the huge, boisterous pop song already
making a mark at Canadian radio.
“That song was done with producer
Matt Squire down in LA at NRG Studios,”
says Johnson. “We did not write ‘Jumpstart;’ Matt and Damon [Sharpe] wrote it
with Kesha’s mom [Pebe Sebert], but we
obviously put our little flare on it; we went
down to write a new song with [Matt] and
we vibed for a day or two and he said, ‘I’ve
got this track for you guys.’ And, to be honest, when we heard it, it felt like we had
written that song.”
It’s understandable why. The lyrics
have a sense of zoom, an I’m-on-myway determination that epitomizes
These Kids Wear Crowns’ original
mind-set and resulting career trajectory. In fact, it was drummer Josh
Mitchinson who was their “spark,”
otherwise these kids might still be in
B.C. dabbling in music as a hobby and
working full-time day jobs.
Johnson, Mitchinson, bassist Alan
Poettcker, guitarists Joshua “Gypsy”
McDaniel and Joe Porter and synthesist/programmer Matt Vink had all
played in bands before and founding
members Poettcker, Vink and Johnson weren’t keen on starting another
“band,” per se.
“Originally, we were going to do an electro project, a three-piece dance band, just
keyboards and vocals,” recalls Poettcker.
“Then Josh Mitchinson contacted us and
said, ‘Hey I play drums and I heard this
band you used to play in a few years ago
[Goodnight Medic, which placed top 10
in 2008’s Seeds competition on CFOX]
and I’d like to start something with you
because I like what you do with music.’
“We’d just written a bunch of songs
and Josh flew over from England and he
was like, ‘I’d like to play in a band like that
around here.’ Alex, Matt and I were really
against it; we were like, ‘No, we don’t want
to do that kind of stuff; we don’t really play
‘in’ a band; we want to try something else.’
Then Josh came over to Matt’s house one

time and we watched him play the drums
for like 30 seconds and we all just knew.
“The first song we ever did together was
‘Fifa 99’ — that ended up on our first CD —
and it has more of a rock sound. Josh was
unbelievable and we knew that we wanted
to start a band again. It was weird.”
That was 2009, only two short years ago.
A five-piece back then (Gypsy had not yet
joined), they recorded a CD EP in the summer before even having what Poettcker
calls a “full-on” band practice. “The priority of this band has always been writing
songs over getting together and playing,”
explains Poettcker.
“Everyone had already played in decent
bands before we all got together. So everyone knew what to do to make it sound
good live.”

“

Everyone can
enjoy dance
music. Everyone can
get up and dance. It’s
the music that we’re
drawn to.”

—Alex Johnson

The EP was released in September of ’09
and, in the fall, These Kids Wear Crowns
hit the road. While on tour, the band was
asked to appear on MuchMusic’s make-orbreak show, disBAND, and quickly asked
Gypsy, who played in A Trophy Life, to join
the lineup as a second guitarist. These Kids
got the thumbs-up on the show, meaning
they should not disband.
“You can’t pay for that kind of exposure,”
says Poettcker. “When they asked us to do it
at first, we talked about it with friends and
family; and they said, ‘MuchMusic’s just
going to exploit you and use you.’ Then the
band talked about it a lot and we just came
up with the idea, ‘We’re going to make the
most of this opportunity. It was great and
MuchMusic had our backs from day one.”
Soon there was label interest and These
Kids Wear Crowns signed with EMI Mu-

sic Canada, which released a reworked
version of the EP in late-August 2010 with
8 songs, including “Fifa 99,” the break-out
single “Break It Up,” “Skeletons,” an acoustic version of “Break It Up” and a remix of
“Holding On.” In the fall, the band returned
to the studio to complete work on its first
full-length.
The 11-song album — produced by such
names as Matt Squire (3OH!3, Katy Perry,
Selena Gomez), Gggarth Richardson (Red
Hot Chili Peppers, Hedley) and Jeff Rockwell (Forever The Sickest Kids) — includes
“Skeletons,” “Break It Up,” “Oceans” and
“We All Fall Down” from the EPs, plus
brand new material.
“Don’t Sweat It” is a programmingheavy come on and “Let’s Ride” a slightly
more plaintive, emotional number. There’s
a whirling electro version of the Whitney Houston hit “I Wanna Dance with
Somebody” — the only other song
besides “Jumpstart” on the album
that These Kids Wear Crowns didn’t
write. “Good Friends (With Bad Benefits)” is another inspiring bouncy cut
and “Don’t Sweat It” is the rock ‘n’ roll
song of the bunch. Of course, essentially These Kids Wear Crowns are an
electro-sparked dance band and that’s
their intention.
“This whole album is just about getting people up off their feet and dancing,” says Johnson. “It’s much more
dedicated to dance than our EPs, but
still has the same These Kids flavour. It
has our familiar fun melodies and lyrics
for fans. Everyone can enjoy dance music.
Everyone can get up and dance. It’s the
music that we’re drawn to.
“Oddly enough,” Johnson muses, “we’re
six dudes that get along and we all understand where we want to go. We’re just really good at getting along. I have my beliefs
and politics — like I’m
a liberal and Alan’s a
conservative, but we get
along just fine. Well, I’m
not a true liberal, but it’s
just something we joke
about — we don’t necessarily agree on political
or philosophical beliefs,
Jumpstart is
available now
but we can agree on mufrom EMI Music
sic together.”
Canada.
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/movies

Our Insatiable Hunger
For The Apocalypse
Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love
the Zombies / by Andrea Trace

“Y

ou never hear from Zombies! That’s the trouble with

Zombies, they’re unreliable!” So said George Carlin. But it
doesn’t matter if zombies are unreliable; we all love a good
zombie. ¶ In fact, humans love the whole end-of-the-world
thing. From Ragnarök to Revelations, we’ve been talking
about the end of civilization as we know it for over two
thousand years. Zombies may be a late addition to the story cycle,
entering the culture through the West African Vodun religion, with
its new world derivatives Haitian Vodou and New Orleans Voodoo,
but the fascination with a day of judgment has been with us for most
of our literate history. We’re apocalypse junkies.
The latest entry into the mythos is
AMC’s The Walking Dead. Brainchild of
writer/director/producer Frank Darabont
(Shawshank Redemption, The Green Mile)
and based on the insanely popular comic
books by Robert Kirkman, The Walking
Dead is a habit-forming, weekly zombie
fest with a ferocious bite.
Genre films (and TV shows), and zombie-types in particular, have much in common with the venerable sonnet. Just as a
sonnet has rigorous strictures based on
form- a particular number of lines and precise syllable count- there are very specific
rules to be followed when building a zombie universe. However, as long as you stay
inside the lines, you can be as free with the
form as you choose.
Darabont (as did Kirkman before him)
uses that freedom to probe character and
lead us to ask ourselves the big question:
“If I were a survivor, what would I do?”
We all assume we will be among the living after the Big Bang, but just how successfully will you negotiate the terrors
of post-apocalyptic Earth? “They’re very
ordinary folk,” comments Andrew Lincoln
(Love Actually), who plays the apocalypsecapable Rick Grimes, “but they’re the survivors and (the show) asks that question:
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How far away have we gone? How sanitized
hitting, story-driven series on AMC, The
have we become? How out of contact with
Walking Dead is almost more movie than
the land have we become?”
TV. The production values are high, the
The rule book for the makers of The
writing impeccable, the direction filled
Walking Dead was written by George A.
with edge-of-your-seat tension. This is
Romero. “I’ve always wanted to do my
not a show for the faint of heart. Daratake on the zombie mythos, since I was a
bont and subsequent directors don’t pull
kid and I saw Romero’s Night of the Liv- any punches when it comes to the gorier
ing Dead - the 1968 black and white ver- aspects of life among the zombies. Writer
sion,” explains Darabont. “For our zombie Kirkman was pleasantly surprised by the
show I’m calling that the Book of Genesis,
scope of the production.
and whenever there’s a question about
“I was on a movie set last summer that
zombie behavior I go back to Night of the was like a big budget blockbuster, and beLiving Dead. Here’s my favorite thing: fore I got out here I told myself, “I’m not
the endless debate among the fans about
going to be seeing the same kind of stuff
how fast a zombie can move. There are
because they don’t have a budget like a
the folks who just can’t stand
summer blockbuster.” But you
seeing zombies running. I’m
know what? It’s almost bigger.
kind of in that camp, but if you
The first day I was here was the
look at the very first zombie in
day after they had flipped the
Night - the one in the cemetery
car and there was a big shootchasing Barbara, he gets up to
out that we saw. It was just aba pretty good jog. I’m keying
solutely mind-blowing.”
our zombie behavior off of that
Although the special effects
film: Whether they’re in a very
and action sequences are exploThe Walking
languid state or they’re on the
sive, the glue holding the series
Dead: Complete
attack, they’ll move no faster
together, and binding a recordSeason One is
than that first zombie in Night
breaking audience to the show,
available on
DVD and Blu-ray
of the Living Dead.”
is the story. Says executive proMarch 8th from
Like Mad Men, another hard
ducer Gale Anne Hurd: “The
Anchor Bay.

best genre films are character driven. And
dream come true.”
the craziest thing I’ve ever seen. A three
while they have an intriguing premise and
One of the hallmarks of The Walking
by three block square of Atlanta was shut
terrific special effects, at the end of the day
Dead is the fidelity to the original matedown… you could get to a certain point
they’re rooted in complex characters and
rial. As Kirkman says, “Everyone is really
in the area that they were shooting, and
great stories… What’s so wonderful about trying to do good by the comic, and there kind of turn around in a 360 degree view,
The Walking Dead is that we’re able to exare scenes that are straight out of it. I think and that’s like, ‘OK here’s what it’s like at
plore human nature [at] its most depraved
that fans are just going to be thrilled. But at the end of the world, and I’m standing in
as well as its most humanitarthe middle of it.’ They had
ian in each episode. We strip
trucks turned over and a
each character down to their
burned out bus, they had all
most basic survival instincts
the stores closed and dressed
-- or lack thereof. It’s actually
to look like the windows had
Amongst the very best the genre
the zombies who are the most
all been cracked. And then all
has ever produced... The Walking
predictable: You know what
of a sudden, here’s hundreds
zombies are after. What you
of zombie extras walking
Dead is easily the most compelling
can’t anticipate is how one
around.”
new series on television this
surviving human is going to
It’s this attention to detail
interact with another. And
that
feeds into our apocayear, and it represents a true
that’s what keeps the series
lypse fixation, making the
achievement for the horror genre.”
fresh and compelling.”
show “surprisingly scary
The series opens with
and remarkably good,” as
— Fast Forward Weekly (Calgary)
county sheriff Rick Grimes
The New York Times says.
waking up out of a coma alone
You are there, just where
–really alone- in a hospital room. While he the same time, [Frank Darabont] is vastly you want to be, on the threshold of a new
lay unconscious, his world has been liter- improving the material. There’s some world. What are you going to do next?
ally eaten alive by a zombie epidemic and
amazing stuff he added for Morgan’s charThe Walking Dead: Complete Season
now he has to deal. Sound like fun? “It was acter in the Pilot episode that’s just not in
One is available March 8 on DVD and
the coolest thing,” enthuses Lincoln. “I got
the comic.”
Blu-ray. The rampant anticipation for
to wear Stetson cowboy boots and a bag of
Kirkman was on set for the zombie
Season Two is a measure of our appetite
guns on my back on a horse called Blade. A invasion of Atlanta. “That was probably
for zombies.
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past & present

The deﬁnitive ﬁlm about the
unparalleled Beat Generation author

in stores March 8

WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS

Simon and Garfunkel
Bridge Over Troubled Water
(40th Anniversary Edition)
ALSO AVAILABLE ON

Visit IndieBound.org for more great reads
and to find an indie bookstore (or other

great indie business) near you.

17

h

Music City

N
Indie
Queens

As Nashville reclaims its
musical relevance, “ladies
first” takes on a brand new
meaning / by Sean L. Maloney

ashville used to be a really hip place,

and when it became not a hip place, it
died and the only thing going was Music Row. Now it’s becoming that place
again, where you don’t know who’s going to show up and really what’s going to
happen. Nashville needs to party weird again.” ¶
Caitlin Rose—whose debut full-length, Own Side
Now, hits stores stateside this month after racking up an absurd amount of critical praise across
Europe last year—is sitting in a Nashville cafe as
we try to ascertain exactly why the outside world
seems so enraptured with the women of Music
City. Three of the biggest new stars of the last few
years—Taylor Swift, Ke$ha and Paramore’s Hayley Williams—all call central Tennessee home.
And Nashville’s ladies of the underground haven’t
been slacking either.

Rose, folk-rocker Tristen and girl-gang
garage rockers Those Darlins are all releasing records this month, generating big
buzz from heavyweight sources like NME,
Daytrotter and Spin.com. Jessica Lea
Mayfield, the Ohio native who released the
stunning Tell Me on Nonesuch in January,
has had her praises sung by everyone from
Rolling Stone to NPR. Wanda Jackson—literally the first woman to record rock ’n’ roll
in Nashville—has been brought back into
the fold of popular culture with her latest
record, The Party Ain’t Over, produced
by Nashville transplant Jack White [See
Jeanne Fury’s interview in last month’s
Cowbell].
Courtney Tidwell, who’s best known for
making epic art rock albums beloved in
Europe but hardly heard at home, has seen
her import-only album of classic country
duets with Lambchop’s Kurt Wagner receive high praise from the likes of Pitch-

fork and the Onion A.V. Club, even though,
you know, it’s expensive and hard to find.
Nylon has a crush on all-girl punk group
Heavy Cream, and it’s safe to assume that
after their spring tour with Ty Segall and
their all-out assault on South by Southwest, the rest of the magazines will be, to
quote the old song, totally crushed out as
well. And then there’s all of the ladies waiting in the wings, whose talent hasn’t been
put to tape or the streets yet.
In any other city, a flood of successful
records from the fairer sex might be seen
as either cosmic coincidence or the result
of concerted effort. Here, it’s par for the
course. It’s almost invisible to the outside
world because each record is so unique
and each artist inhabits their own corner
of the music spectrum—it’s not an organized movement like Riot Grrrl or conveniently packaged aesthetic like Lilith Fair.
The women of Nashville aren’t plotting to

take over the music world; that’s just what
people here do. It’s the nature of the beast,
even if that beast runs into some really
strange places.
Mama weer all crazee now

“Everyone here is fucking insane,” says
Rose, whose Linda Ronstadt-channeling
approach to rock ’n’ roll has captured the
hearts of critics on two continents. “It’s almost like they appreciate eccentricity, but
they don’t appreciate showiness. When
somebody comes to town and notices that
they can still be their weird little self and
not have to play songs in their underwear
in the middle of Times Square, then they
learn how to be eccentric, as opposed to
an outsider.
“Nobody can really make a stink about
themselves here. Even if they try, it doesn’t
matter—you can’t force people to go to your
show by handing out fliers. I’m not gonna
19

go—nobody’s gonna go—unless you make
friends, unless you’re a pleasant person to
be around.”
Tristen agrees. From a van somewhere
between Austin, Tex., and Nashville city
limits, touring in preparation of the release of her American Myth Recordings
debut Charlatans at the Garden Gate,
she explains: “I think the scene is really
creative; there a lot of creative people…
but you don’t have as many people strolling into town that are wacky and artistic
without any skill. You have to have skills
to survive.”
The Illinois native makes bright jangly
folk with dark and clever lyrics—not unlike Nashville transplant and pioneering
’60s artist Janis Ian—that is catchy and
beguiling. Imagine TV serial killer Dexter collaborating with the Lemon Pipers,
and you can see why Paste and Daytrotter
have been swooning over tracks like “Baby
Drugs” and “Matchstick Murder.” It’s new,
it’s different, but it’s natural and organic
and free of artifice, much like the music
scene that helped shape it.
traditions collide

“I wouldn’t say it’s the region [that makes
women such a prevalent part of the music
scene] so much as the people [we’re] surrounded by, the people here—especially
[bandmates] Kelly, Nikki, Linwood—it’s
just the way that we’ve been living and the
way we interact with each other,” says Jessi Darlin, one-fourth of Those Darlins, who
started out as a buck-dancing trad-country
trio before honing the wall of snarl psychedelic/surf/punk sound of their sophomore
album, Screws Get Loose.
Brash and anarchic—possibly the only
band in town with lyrics about putting
eggs in the microwave and a yen for songs
about allergic reactions—Those Darlins
are the polar opposite of the well mannered Southern Belle stereotype. Their
hard-partying, humor-filled, brazenly honest music—there’s no real consideration

When somebody
comes to town
and notices that
they can still be
their weird little
self and not have
to play songs in
their underwear
in the middle of
Times Square,
then they learn
how to be
eccentric, as
opposed to an
outsider.
—Caitlin Rose

for the rules of decorum—has won over
major league tastemakers like the Black
Keys’ Dan Auerbach, garage rock legend
Jon Spencer, Rolling Stone and the Gray
Lady herself, the New York Times.
“A lot of people in [Nashville suburb/
indie rock incubator/birthplace of Those
Darlins] Murfreesboro [have been very encouraging],” says Darlin. “The last couple
of years, it was cool to be in an environment where people supported that. I think
of Murfreesboro and the scene that was
going on there—I don’t think that that
couldn’t happen some where else, ’cause
there’s crazy shit going everywhere—but I
think that the specific people surrounding
us really make me feel comfortable.”
“I do think that [these] women have
great ideas, and they’re very set in their
ways and aren’t willing to compromise,”
says Rose. “I do think it is a lot different
from 30 years ago when all it was about
was how you looked and if you had a good
voice. It also has a lot to do with the way
these careers are being approached. We
don’t have big budgets, we don’t have big
labels, we don’t have a billion-dollar industry behind us. For the most part, we’re just

Caitlin Rose

trying to figure out what works.”
Songwriter Jessie Jo Dillon, who cowrote Rose’s “Coming Up,” thinks it’s
about following your bliss. “Everything
comes in waves, of course,” she figures.
“It just seems like the time has presented
itself for [these women to succeed]. I feel
like what there is in common, especially
with those three [Tristen, Rose, Those
Darlins], and, I would like to say, me as a
writer, is just trying to do something we
believe in. Something that means something to you.”
As an underground scene staple who’s
also seen some mainstream country
success—she received a Grammy nomination for her collaboration with George
Strait on “The Breath You Take”—Dillon
has a unique perspective on the situation:
“When I think of Caitlin, her music is very
her—it’s not trying to be something that
it’s not. It’s just like, ‘Hey, this is me, I’m
Caitlin Rose. This is my music. This is my
story, my songs. I’m trying to make you feel
something with my music.’ And I think, really, that’s what [the buzz is] all about.”
“Back in the day, everyone knew what
worked, and that was what they did,” says

Rose. “Now, nobody knows what works,
so we’re all just doing our own thing. And
that’s the best way for it to possibly be. I
don’t really feel anything forced from any
of these artists, and I don’t feel anything
forced from myself. I really have no idea
how it’s even happening—but I think that
the main point is that there’s [no one thing]
that works.
“But it’s nice to see everyone finding…
not their niche, but finding out how to conduct themselves in this business, ’cause it’s
a weird fucking thing. Very weird. It was
fucked for 10 years, and a lot of people got
fucked over, but now it’s fucked in a way
that people are finally admitting that nobody knows how to do it.”
Generation xx

“I think that we’re in pretty modern times,
and maybe in Nashville and the South—
that culture—it’s a little weird to have an
outspoken female, but where I’m from
we’re all loud and obnoxious,” says Tristen. “Maybe it’s a novelty and a new breed
of songwriter in Nashville, but the rock
scene—as far as I’ve been informed—is
sort of a new thing in Nashville. The whole

attitude—it’s not really about the girls
necessarily changing or the new breed of
women writers. I think it’s a new scene
popping up.”
It’s true—the last decade has seen Nashville’s nascent rock underground become
a national contender, and it’s not just the
ladies making things happen. Kings of
Leon have become arguably the biggest
modern rock band in the world, both Jack
White and the Black Keys have relocated
here and become part of the scene, and
hometown boys like JEFF the Brotherhood, Turbo Fruits and Mona have made
big splashes on both sides of the pond. The
city has exploded with young, ambitious
artists bent on making their own music
their own way.
While the outside world may still define
Nashville music by the honky-tonk tourist
traps and the Music Row machine, the locals are working hard to define themselves
as something else altogether. House shows,
home studios, self-released records and an
all-encompassing DIY work ethic are the
foundation for everything that’s happening here—not unlike the era in which the
city first became known as a music Mecca.

The defining characteristic of this generation—regardless of gender—is that it wants
to make music free from interlopers, pencil-pushers and the celebrity-obsessed
culture of coastal media centers.
“Nashville, we’re a really weird, eccentric group of people—we’ve got old-time
business people with these really hip kids,
and that’s who we are,” says Rose. “It’s the
reason Mumford & Sons can move here
and not be accosted everywhere they go…
They don’t feel like gods; everyone in town
treats them normally and they treat everyone normally. That’s why famous people
move here. You have to call paparazzi in
this town.”
“I think the culture in Nashville—where
everybody just wants to play and everyone
will play for free and no one cares about
money all that much,” muses Tristen,
“everyone just wants to play and be a
part of something interesting. That drive,
that’s what separates us from other music
scenes.”
“It’s so unlike anywhere else—I’ve lived
in Los Angeles, I have friends in New York
and Chicago, but Nashville is just it’s own
thing,” says Dillon. “I don’t know if it’s
because it’s Southern, or really what to
attribute it to, but it is sorta cutthroat in
certain aspects, but not to the extreme that
these other towns are. Everyone, even if
they don’t like something, they try to support ‘Nashville’—especially outside of the
mainstream community—because it has
been so hard to cultivate something outside of country music.
“There’s something about our generation that has a lot to do with it. There’s
such an appreciation—male and female—
for the new and the old and trying to
somehow merge them and create something fresh, yet paying homage to what’s
come before… and I don’t feel like you find
that as much in these other music cities.
I know it’s there, but people really pride
themselves on it here.”
21

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23

The
Man
on the
Silver
Mountain
pg. 24

The Mountain Goatsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; John Darnielle
goes mystic on All Eternals Deck.
story by J. Bennett / portrait by jason arthurs

25

John Darnielle is pacing back and forth in
what we imagine to be his living room in
Durham, NC, reading aloud from the liner
notes of the Mountain Goats’ new album,
All Eternals Deck. We can hear the footfall, along with the enthusiasm in his voice as he tells us about the inspiration behind the
band’s 18th album. From what we’ve gleaned thus far, the record
takes its name from an early 20th century tarot deck that may or
may not exist.
“The All Eternals Deck predates Crowley’s tarot by at least
10 years,” Darnielle intones with nigh-theatrical cadence. “Its
earliest known issue arises three months after the first recorded
appearance of the Inhuman Impulse Deck, to which it owes stylistic debt. Beyond these few details, its exact provenance is less
certain…”
In the past, Darnielle has written Mountain Goats albums inspired by the Bible (2009’s The Life of the World to Come), his
years as a teenage tweaker (2004’s We Shall All Be Healed) and
his abused childhood (2005’s The Sunset Tree). With All Eternals
Deck (his first album for Merge records), he seems to be tapping
into a latent occult tendency or two. Possibly.
“The working title for the album was What Young John Saw in
the Entrails,” he offers. “I thought it was kind of an album about
telling the future, surviving into a future, but I don’t think I would
put my own name into an album title. It’s sort of about this feeling
of being drawn to these dark images and being repelled by them
at the same time.”
He returns to the liner notes, relaying the minutiae of the different paper stock and ink used to print the All Eternals Deck
and the Inhuman Impulse Deck. We cut him off mid-sentence
to ask if the information he’s giving us is in any way based on
historical fact.
“If I was a good artist, I would decline to answer that question,”
he chuckles. “So, I will answer by saying that if I was a good artist,
I would decline to answer that question. But I can tell you that
what you’ve just heard are the liner notes for the new Mountain
Goats album, All Eternals Deck.”
Cagey, that Darnielle. An artist’s artist. His lyrics—highly
literary, endlessly dissectible, often very personal, always ardently delivered—have made him no stranger to popular or
critical acclaim.
It certainly wasn’t a typo when the New Yorker called him
“America’s best non-hip-hop lyricist” in 2005. Nor when Paste
proclaimed him one of the “Top 100 Living Songwriters” the following year, placing Darnielle at No. 82, right between Fleetwood
Mac and the Flaming Lips.
His fans are even more reverential, writing lengthy essays on,
theses about and analyses of Darnielle’s lyrics, and posting them
on the forum at mountain-goats.com. In 2009, New York magazine
26

followed a punk rock fan who burned his music collection in his
backyard after discovering the Mountain Goats, so profound was
his conversion. The band even appeared on The Colbert Report
that year, as Stephen Colbert is such a huge adherent. Others have
started a Facebook campaign to get Darnielle a bit part on his
favorite TV show, Law & Order SVU. (“I consider my chances of
getting on the show extremely faint, but I should love for them to
become better,” he enthuses. “At the same time, I will act the crap
out of any part they might give me.”)
This outpouring of admiration can often border on worship,
creating an occasionally uncomfortable reality for Darnielle.
“The one thing that’s overwhelming is that people assume that
I’m a good conversationalist, and I don’t really think I am,” he says.
“I think I’m kind of an awkward talker. I love to hear what people
have to say, but I don’t feel I have much to say outside of what I
write or sing. But I do think that 99 percent of the people who
listen to my music are people who are like me. They vary in terms
of their beliefs and what they’re passionate about, but we tend to
share one thing, and that’s that we like to listen to music, especially if it has some sort of story or lyrical focus that hits us in a
certain emotional way. I’m just a guy who happens to have learned
how to write this stuff. But when there’re five or six people who
wanna talk to you at once, it can feel a little overwhelming.”
The weekend before we spoke for this story, Darnielle, 43, got
to witness firsthand how other celebrity types deal with the onslaught. He was at the NHL All-Star Game in Raleigh, watching
18-year-old Carolina Hurricanes center Jeff Skinner field questions from reporters.
“He was surrounded by about 20 or 30 dudes all talking at once,
and he was fielding their questions with ease,” Darnielle recalls.
“For me, sometimes it feels crushing because I’m kind of a private person, but I don’t wanna be the guy who says, ‘Oh, this is
overwhelming,’ because, seriously, I get to work as a musician.
I hit the lottery.”
Maybe we should back up and point out that Darnielle was
not at the All-Star Game as an everyday fan, tucked away in the
nosebleeds swilling shitty overpriced lager from a plastic cup. No,
he was covering the game as a journalist for Raleigh-Durham’s
Independent Weekly.
“In other words, I was hitting the lottery for a second time,”
he laughs. “My wife [Lalitree Darnielle] was working there as a
photographer, and I was there writing about the game, typing as I
was watching. It was completely awesome. I got to go to the locker
room and do some interviews, too. I’m the worst interviewer on
the planet, though, because I don’t have any questions. I just stood

there listening to other people’s questions, going, ‘Oh, yeah—
good question!’ But it was a lot of fun. My copy is actually due at
5 o’clock today, which is so exciting and romantic to me.” (Read
his coverage at ow.ly/3WU95)
Darnielle’s image as a sensitive, Bible-quoting troubadour
doesn’t quite square with the organized practice of toothless Canadians knocking the tar out of each other—on ice—while legions
of fat loggernauts get drunk in the stands. And yet, there it is.
“How can you not be a hockey fan?” he asks, incredulously. “I
really can’t understand why everyone doesn’t like hockey. It is the
best game. It’s like soccer, though—it’s a poem, it’s a ballet, and
you can’t sell people on that. But it’s like you’re watching a story
develop that is being lived in real life and will count for or against
the teams that are playing it. I mean, I grew up a geek, so I wasn’t
good at sports. A lot of us maintain those biases, but those biases
are silly. Sports are awesome.”
There is another element of Darnielle’s personality that seems

at odds with the guy who wrote an entire album of songs inspired
by and named after some of his favorite Bible passages, and it is
this: John Darnielle is a HUGE death metal fan. With little prodding, he will talk at length about the virtues of the triple-disc
Cannibal Corpse documentary, Centuries of Torment: The First
20 Years. Or The Erosion of Sanity, the 1993 album by Quebecois
tech-death dealers Gorguts (“If I had a list of my top 10 death
metal albums in my head, this would be on it,” Darnielle insists).
Or the reasons why he chose renowned death metal musician
and producer Erik Rutan of Hate Eternal to produce four of the
13 songs on All Eternals Deck.
“Death metal is a lifelong discipline,” Darnielle says with just a
touch of awe in his voice. “It’s like working at an iron forge. But for
a lot of people it’s kinda
funny because there’s so
much gore and misogyny in the lyrics. Meanwhile, I’m a feminist
who plays an acoustic
guitar. But what death
metal is about for me is
that I may be who I am
now—and hopefully
I’m an okay person—
but I used to be a speed
freak. I was not always
a good person. I was
a nasty piece of work
at one point in my life.
So, I think death metal
is sort of about learning to really engage the fullness of human
experience. It’s for when you have so much aggression in you that
you have to put it somewhere. Which is why when I have a bad
day, I listen to Hate Eternal. I’ve talked to Erik about it, and he
said, ‘Dude, that’s what this music is for.’”
Darnielle’s fans know all about his fascination with death
metal, but it’s unclear if they really understand it.
“I often get people asking me why I don’t make a death metal
record,” he offers. “But it’s obvious to anyone who listens to the
stuff: I’m just not that kind of guitarist. I’d have to go back to my

11th year on this planet, get an electric guitar instead of piano
lessons, and then live and die with that guitar for the next 10 years
before I was fit to play a riff. The metal I listen to is music of profound proficiency played by people whose musicianship I will
never even be able to approximate.”
Though Darnielle may live his whole life without shredding
a proper Morbid Angel solo, his involvement in the metal scene
runs deeper than just bro-ing down with Rutan and hitting the
occasional Cannibal Corpse show. For starters, he’s been writing his hilarious back-page column, South Pole Dispatch, for extreme metal monthly Decibel [Cowbell’s sister publication] since
the magazine’s inception in 2004.
In 2008, Darnielle wrote a novella about Black Sabbath’s Master of Reality for Continuum Books’ 33⅓ series concerning the
making of classic albums. Whereas most of the books in the 33⅓
catalog examine a particular album through the usual academic
contexts—historical, critical, musical, etc.—Darnielle’s is a work
of fiction.
“I told them I wanted to look at the album through the lens of
a 14-year-old boy being held in a [psychiatric] treatment center,”
he says. “I didn’t even pitch them on the back end, in which the
kid is an adult looking back on his experience, because I didn’t
know it was going to go that way. I’ll never forget the morning
that happened, because it came as a surprise to me. Suddenly,
there was this feeling of forward motion, and I asked myself, as a
former nurse, what would happen next.”
This is where Darnielle’s two writerly disciplines intersect: on
the grounds of a mental hospital in Norwalk, Calif. The Mountain Goats began, more or less, while Darnielle was working as a
psychiatric nurse at the Metropolitan State Hospital in Norwalk,
where he would record his early songs on a cassette boombox.
But the man who would
become the Mountain
Goats wanted to be a
writer first and foremost.
“Sometimes it’s hard
for me to think of myself
as a songwriter at all
because I wanted to be
a writer—not a singer,
not a songwriter—the
longest. But I suppose it
depends if you’re asking
me what my ambitions
are or how I would describe myself from the
outside. If John Darnielle was an alien creature and I was a scientist who came to see
what he does everyday, I’d say, ‘That’s a songwriter. It’s clear that’s
what he does.’ That’s where I work most naturally. That’s where,
when I start working, I get where I’m going quickest. Whereas
the other types of writing take more effort. But I kind of hope at
the end of my life I’ll write a few good novels.”
With the Master of Reality novella already under his belt and
a second book in progress, Darnielle is walking the talk. Just
don’t necessarily expect his latest manuscript to be published
any time soon.

“Death metal is a lifelong discipline.
It’s like working at an iron forge. But for
a lot of people it’s kinda funny because
there’s so much gore and misogyny in the
lyrics. Meanwhile, I’m a feminist who
plays an acoustic guitar.”

John Darnielle

27

“That’s the other thing: With songs, they come naturally, and I
finish them,” he laughs. “Whereas I can see how people work their
whole lives on a novel. It goes this way and that way—it’s a big
messy thing. A song is a compact and physical experience. Songs
can be written in one sitting. Novels could conceivably be written in one sitting by a tweaker, I suppose, but generally speaking,
a novel is a very long piece of traveling from one place to many,
many other places. As I’m working on my second one, I just feel
awe of the people who write good ones.”
In a January 17 interview with Pitchfork, Darnielle mentioned

that he had recently woken up in the middle of the night, listened to Joni Mitchell’s For the Roses, and then listened to All
Eternals Deck.
“For people trying fuse poetry and song, there’s hardly anyone
higher than Joni Mitchell,” he explains. “She’s
in that elite company
with Bob Dylan and
Leonard Cohen, but for
me, she’s the one who’s
been most important.
Listening to her stuff
just opened up the
sky for me when I was

younger. So, I just sort of wanted to A/B them. I doubt I will ever
make a work as enduring as Joni Mitchell, but it’s interesting to
sort of listen and check myself against the people I really look
up to.”
Whether All Eternals Deck holds up to Darnielle’s personal standards will ultimately be up to him. But if early reactions to the album’s leadoff track, “Damn These Vampires” (chorus: Damn these
vampires, for what they’ve done to me), are any indication, Darnielle
has at least lived up to his fans’ ever-towering expectations.
“There’s a core of people who know that what I’m about is the
comic power of darkness,” he ventures. “That in your personal
darkness there are these moments of comic triumph that you can
really revel in. People have that expectation of me, but they also
wanna see where I can take it. Can I make a song where there’s a
three-part male choir singing? Can I take it to places that are more
interesting musically
than a guy playing guitar
as hard as he can? But at
the end of the day, when
I sit down and write, I’m
doing the same thing
I’ve always been doing.
I’ve got a decent idea,
and I try to make it a
better one.”

“The working title for the album was
What Young John Saw in the Entrails.
I thought it was kind of an album about
telling the future, surviving into a
future…It’s sort of about this feeling of
being drawn to these dark images and
being repelled by them at the same time.”

John Darnielle

28

photo by d.l. anderson

THE

new music
reviewed and graded for
your aural pleasure

Brew Crew

Minimalist Seattle supergroup the Cave Singers louden up on their junior effort

B

y the time the Cave Singers dropped Invitation Songs in 2007, “folk music” had become a ri-

diculously baggy catchall used to describe everyone from Joanna Newsom to Animal Collective
by way of Hoots and Hellmouth. Never mind that the trio’s early sound stemmed largely from
a series of happy accidents, and that guitarist Derek Fudesco, vocalist Pete Quirk and percussionist Marty Lund all claimed backgrounds (and foregrounds) light on folk and heavy on rock.
Simply playing raw acoustic music landed the Seattle-based trio in a pigeonhole that even

The Cave Singers

No Witch

Jagjaguwar

2009’s decidedly more polished Welcome Joy failed
to pull them out of—though it did inspire less flexible fans to grouse about the change in emphasis.
They’ll bitch even more about No Witch for one
reason: It’s a fully baked rock album, rendered all the
richer by producer Randall Dunn (Black Mountain,
Sunn 0))), Boris). Not that the journey from coffeehouse to roadhouse has left the Cave Singers bereft
of hard-earned roots: Ex-Pretty Girls Make Graves
and Murder City Devils bassist Fudesco tweaks various American traditions so adroitly, you’d never
guess he was a guitar noob at the band’s conception,

while Quirk now sounds like a bona fide Americana
dude rather than yesteryear’s front-runner in a
Devendra Banhart parody contest. They even occasionally slouch toward Appalachia, as per “Gifts
and the Raft” and the decidedly campfire-friendly
“Swim Club.”
Plus, the band never so much as threatens to
disconnect from the blues. Buttressed by Lund’s
low-key tribal tattoo, “Black Leaf ” rides a riff so
murderously efficient, the likes of Black Mountain
(or Bob Dylan) should be willing to sell their souls
for it. Fudesco even leaks a little Delta mud into
29

THE

reviews

raga-rocker “Outer Realms.” Gospel tendencies find
a home on the chorus of “Falls”—right alongside
trombone drones and radio drama organ. Even at
their most eclectic, the band never overreaches—
nor do they venture anywhere near the sort of playacting and minstrelsy the Black Keys sometimes
lapse into. Credit for much of the latter resides in
Quirk’s insistence on anchoring lyrics to everyday
situations—never more than on home-base shoutout “Haller Lake.” The chorus’ “send me away in the
evening sun” is notable if only for juxtaposing Sol
and Seattle in the same song.
Abundant assets aside, No Witch isn’t without
what nitpickers might interpret as the occasional
misstep—parts of “Haystacks” smack a little too
much of Neil Diamond to engage listeners who,
thanks to Vampire Weekend, are observing lifelong
embargos on ’70s pop. But one person’s poison is
another’s manna. Even the Cave Singers’ enhanced
recorded presence is bound to inspire a few haters.
The rest of us have nothing to complain about.
—Rod Smith

Acid House Kings

Music Sounds
Better With You
Labrador

Wall of sunshine
The Acid House Kings don’t play house, acid or
otherwise. They’re a bright and sunny band that
manages to distill the entire history of American
and British pop music into delicious, easy-todigest nuggets.
A giddy guitar line opens “Are We Lovers or
Are We Friends?” for a perfect, soaring tune that
suggests new wave, Motown and Merseybeat.
“Where Have We Been?” blends girl group handclaps, R&B horns and flamenco guitar to support
Niklas Angergård’s breezy vocal. “Windshield”
suggests a low-budget wall of sound, although
“wall of sunshine” might be a better description of
this flighty tune highlighted by Julia Lannerheim’s
breathless vocal. “Heaven Knows I Miss Him Now”
uses a simple ’60s turnaround played with a slight
Latin feel to close the album on a cheerful note.
It’s easy to spot the influences on every song,
but the music is played with such innocent enthusiasm that it’s hard to find fault with AHK’s retro
obsessions. —j. poet
Cloud Nothings

Akron/Family hardly lack a sense of continuity.
From finger-picked guitars to luminous vocal
S/T II: The Cosmic
harmonies by way of era-corrected hippie POV, S/T II
Birth and Journey
swarms with forces at work since 2002, when the bicoastal
of Shinju TNT
psychonauts first started exploring their shared omnivorousness and seemingly bottomless supply of chops in and
Dead Oceans
around Williamsburg. What gives the band a chameleonic
air is its aptitude for constantly redirecting those forces.
The epic schemes and West African rhythms that dominated ’09’s Set’Em Wild, Set’Em Free hardly figure on the trio’s sixth album. Songs
run short—less than six minutes—while their longstanding fascination with field
recordings and electronics returns to the fore.
They even use their old work as raw material, dusting the entire album with
sampled shards of 2005’s Akron/Family. It’s a testament to the trio’s vision that the
decorative elements do nothing to make them seem less barefoot in the head, but
simply yank many of the album’s mellower moments off the back porch and hurl
them into orbit, as on all-purpose departure announcement “A AAA O A WAY.”
Given the band’s manifest fascination with acoustically informed chill-enhancement gambits, S/T II offers a surprisingly high rocker count. Vocation milestone “Silly Bears” gallops toward a burning horizon on legs of vintage electronic
drum sounds and a one-note bassline that provides the perfect backbone for its
surging choral finale. Ending on the word “friend,” sung a cappella, couldn’t be
more appropriate. —Rod Smith
Akron/Family

fist-pump Ramones-ish choruses, bleedinglarynx throwdowns—this is the sound of spiraling,
post-adolescent agony translated into three-chord
ecstasy, an analogue of sorts to the mano-a-mano
ferocity of Wavves’ King of the Beach.
“Not Important” is screamo, idol-envying ruckus, whereas the barnstorming, puerile “You’re Not
That Good at Anything” may prove that the dispensing of insults is a smokescreen for insecurities
on the part of the dispenser, but it’ll stoke plenty of
moshpits when Baldi goes on tour later this year.
And the churning, flailing “Rock” is as bittersweet
as it is Superchunk-sour: “You love me, but now
we’re both dead,” Baldi yelps, ad infinitum, into
the herky-jerky maw of his own maelstrom. Dick
moves are rarely this striking—or this unrelentingly catchy. —Raymond Cummings

Tides,” is reminiscent of Radiohead’s “Exit Music
(for a Film).” This concept of culling from varied
sources, though, has always allowed the band to
play with an impressive diversity. And their dexterous orchestrations and muscular production,
along with singer Murray Lightburn’s Morrissey
lounge act, allow them to occasionally even sound
innovative.
Degeneration Street is long, stuffed with a laundry list of influences. But by the end, the Dears
sound less like record collectors and more like
exceptional songwriters. —Shane Mehling

Death

Spiritual, Mental,
Physical
Drag City

Not much to live for

The Dears

Degeneration Street
Dangerbird

Originality is overrated
The Dears have always known
that everything old is new again. While musicians
are finding inspiration more and more in older, defined genres, the Montréal band has blatantly employed familiar sounds over the last 15 years. On
their fifth release, Degeneration Street, they continue to prove that this is their greatest strength.
“Thrones” is a glimmering ode to the Jesus
and Mary Chain, “5 Chords” mixes ’80s Bowie
with the Cure, and the strongest track, “Galactic

Not to be confused with the Floridian metal band of
the same name, Detroit’s Death existed from 1971
to 1977. In those six years, the band made one visit
to a proper recording studio, which yielded seven
songs. Two of those appeared on their only official
release, a self-financed 7-inch. These days, that
record goes for about $600 whenever it pops up
on eBay. In 2009, Death ceased to be a record collector’s secret when Drag City released their entire
studio output as ...For the Whole World to See.
Where that reissue unearthed a lost relic,
Spritual, Mental, Physical finds the band finding
themselves. Culled from even earlier demos than
the previous reissue, the band dicks around with

partial covers, dabbles in some noises and tinkers
with ideas that would later get reworked in that
studio session they did. There’s little purpose to
this record outside documentary purposes, and
it’s too bad the songs mentioned above weren’t included in the previous reissue. There’s little reason
to listen to this one instead. —Matt Sullivan

The Death Set

Michel Poiccard
Counter

Puree at heart
The Death Set, originally from
Australia, then of Baltimore, and now of Brooklyn,
are an archetypal post-Internet band. They hop
from locale to locale musically as well as physically:
Michel Poiccard’s leaps from synth-screamo (“Slap
Slap Slap Pound Up Down Snap”) to the postcardperfect indie pop of “Is It the End Again?” spring up
like images on a Tumblr feed. Or, more historically,
like they did on the Beastie Boys’ 1992 Check Your
Head, this album’s spiritual predecessor.
“We Are Going Nowhere Man” is skate-video
soundtrack-ready, a speedy wall of guitar with a
plaintive chorus, “A problem is a problem it doesn’t
matter where you from” a strange early-’90s
blender of emergent rap-rock and rave synths. All
of it is basically here as fuel for their live show—one
of the most glorious concert experiences going, as
the band leaps around ecstatically and intersperses
their own songs with snippets of ’80s faves like
Prince and INXS. —Michaelangelo Matos

Well-Respected No More?
Ray Davies’ duets record
doesn’t work out the Kinks

G

eezus, Ray, what in the hell were you

thinking? We’re all for trying to squeeze a little more
blood out of classic tracks, and we’re all for May-SepSee My Friends
tember artistic collaborations—when they work—but why would
you ever let Jon Bon Jovi and Metallica anywhere near your redecca
cord? Did you need the company of other artists that hadn’t made
a good record since the ’80s? And what’s with all the milquetoast
modern bands? One would think, being Ray Davies and all, you’d be able to rope in more
interesting artists than Snow Patrol and Mumford & Sons. Duets records are rarely more
than money grabs, and this one doesn’t feel much different.
Which isn’t to say that this album is completely devoid of quality—about half of it is
garbage, but the other half is great. Jackson Browne on “Waterloo Sunset”? Awesome.
The dearly departed Alex Chilton revisiting “Till the End of the Day”? Stellar. Same goes
for the Black Francis appearance and Lucinda Williams on “A Long Way From Home.”
Billy Corgan, on the other hand, should never be allowed in front of a microphone again,
and his screeching more or less ruins what would have otherwise been a pretty cool
medley of “All of the Day and All of the Night” and “Destroyer.” Points for trying, but I
think I’m gonna just stick with your classic catalog, Ray. —Sean L. Maloney
Ray Davies

photo by Lucy Hamblin

31

THE

reviews

Dum Dum Girls

He Gets Me High
Sub Pop

Comfortably dum
Somewhere (okay, Los Angeles), there are four girls named Dee Dee, Bambi,
Sandy and Jules with the words “Dum Dum” tattooed on their fingers. They’re hanging out in a reverb chamber with Richard Gottehrer (the genius
who wrote “My Boyfriend’s Back”) and the dude
from the Raveonettes, recording huge jangly pop
songs that stick to your brainpan like Bubblicious

sticks oh-so-tragically to the Girls’ stiletto heels.
Like those of their 2010 debut, I Will Be, the
cavernous, casually cool tracks on this four-song
EP—which closes with a thunderous cover of the
Smiths’ “There Is a Light That Never Goes Out”—
are nothing short of infectious. From the ghostly
vocal harmonies and slow Mazzy Star swing of
“Take Care of My Baby” to the rubbery bass buzz,
shimmering guitar fuzz and Phil Spector drums
of the title track, the Girls’ collective sense of
melody, of space, of how to wear fishnets without looking slutty—are all impeccable. So is this
EP. —J. Bennett

East River Pipe

We Live in Rented Rooms
Merge

Ownership issues
“The whole world is made on
backroom deals / You better get used to it,” F.M.
Cornog tells us to start his seventh pseudonymous album. It’s equal parts tough love and tough
shit as usual for East River Pipe; world-weariness
is presupposed. But Cornog engages with that
world rather than just falling back in despair; even
a line like “You’re like a visit from the ice man, the

Ordinary
People?
For Portland’s baroque
poppers, simplicity
and subtlety are not
mutually exclusive

T

he King Is Dead is, unques-

tionably, the Decemberists’
most ordinary record. Markedly less ambitious (outwardly, anyway)
than the byzantine story-songs and oldfangled, concept-driven folderol that
reached an apogee on the thorny, toilsome Hazards of Love, these 10 relatively
straightforward songs—surveying a range
of resolutely rootsy American rock
and folk styles—present some artistic hazards of their own. There’s
an easily bungled subtlety, after all,
to what troubadour-in-chief Colin Meloy calls “the complexity of
simple songs.”
The Decemberists
But while Meloy’s distinctive
The King Is Dead
diction sticks out occasionally (and
capitol
you kinda want to hug him for it), he
and his band, with a few well-chosen confederates, pull off the gambit admirably. “Don’t Carry It
All” trades Picaresque’s scene-setting shofar for a gloriously shrill
harmonica, kicking off a rousing, full-throttle Americana anthem
(complete with Gillian Welch, the indie generation’s Emmylou
Harris), while the superb, driving “Calamity Song” manages to
both luxuriate in and transcend its blatant (and roundly, rightly

32

reckoned) R.E.M.-iniscent qualities—Peter Buck’s presence aside,
it also emphasizes Meloy’s Stipe-ian timbre and capacity for lyrical obfuscation (in this case, dreaming up the end of the world
as we know it).
The album’s other pleasures are often subtler: the gentle, moving “Rise to Me” (partially addressed to Meloy’s young son); the
pair of sweetly breezy seasonal “Hymns,” recalling the calm clarity of the band’s earliest days. There’s no denying the familiarity
of certain sounds here, but it’s always resoundingly, recognizably
the Decemberists, which—given their tendency toward stilted
theatricality—feels surprisingly natural and comfortable. And
if it occasionally gets a little bit dull—well, such are the perils of
normalcy. —K. Ross Hoffman

photo by autumn dewilde

angel of death” (“Cold Ground”) sets up a tune of
surpassing warmth, with Cornog’s stately, acoustic guitar-driven arrangement and brief electric
solo at the end give it a genuine lift.
“Payback Time” describes a disintegrating
relationship over steadily rising synthesizer

layers. And most movingly of all, “The Flames
Are Coming Back” is both baleful and hopeful,
a kind of torch song in reverse—he’s trying to
conjure them, pleading, “Baby, can’t you see?”
She probably can’t. But we can hear it.
—Michaelangelo Matos

What It Isn’t Good For
PJ Harvey wages a war of words

A

s recording artists go, Polly Jean Harvey

is not a risk taker. She won’t touch something
until she’s on top of it. She’s had her dull spots,
but nowhere in her catalog has she failed to impress with
PJ Harvey
Let England Shake
the way she grips subjects by the throat, even if they’re reciprocating the squeeze.
Vagrant
Let England Shake is Harvey’s first foray into the political realm, breaching themes of war and allegiance to/
abhorrence of one’s country, wherever that may be. It’s potentially disastrous
territory for any artist who’s built their career dishing on human emotions, but
Harvey navigates the minefield. She spent two years on the lyrics before touching
an instrument, a process which has yielded some of her best material to date.
From beguiling cries to dissonant caws, her vocal versatility is rock solid. And
though the tunes—anchored by whimsical percussion, humid horn accents and
carousel-music-like buoyancy—are often at odds with the dire lyrics, Let England
Shake is remarkably harmonious. “The Last Living Rose” opens with a creeping
guitar reminiscent of the Rid of Me era, while the lilt of Harvey’s tongue beautifully
maneuvers through nostalgia for England’s filth and fog. A soft, dreamy hymnal,
“Written on the Forehead” speaks of the battered and war-torn. A small chorus
implores “Let it burn” behind the slight reverb in Harvey’s angelic voice. And while
you’re clapping along to “The Words That Maketh Murder,” she recalls soldiers
falling “like lumps of meat.” That Harvey is now able to reap material from the
world beyond her own flesh has placed countless possibilities within her reach.
—Jeanne Fury

photo by seamus murphy

Eleventh Dream Day

Riot Now!

Thrill Jockey

Chicago’s best weapon
contribution since the
Manhattan Project
It’s been a quarter-century since Rick Rizzo and
Janet Beveridge Bean began filtering their alt-rock
chops through their prismatic adoration of Neil
Young to create Eleventh Dream Day’s gloriously
melodic cacophony. Lineup changes, fickle commercial winds and label indifference have conspired against 11DD, but it’s rarely had an impact
on the honesty with which the band approaches
its brash and beautiful noise.
Riot Now!, 11DD’s first new album in five years,
bristles with the kind of squalling intensity that
defined the band’s earliest albums, an amazing accomplishment considering the nearly malicious
neglect they’ve experienced. Opener “Damned
Tree” is an insistent case in point, a howling mad
mash-up of Dictators/Dolls punk rock thunder and
Mission of Burma indie rock lightning, with the
ever present Crazy Horse squeal drifting through
the proceedings like a palpable cloud of feedback
smoke. Anyone with memories of Eleventh Dream
Day will tremble at the raw wonder of Riot Now!
Anyone lacking those memories should fill in the
gaps immediately. —Brian Baker
Matthew Friedberger

Napoleonette

Thrill Jockey

The first of many solos for
the Fiery Furnace stoker
Look up “prolific” in the dictionary and you’ll find
a picture of Matthew Friedberger laughing at the
definition of “prolific.” Friedberger and sister Eleanor have released 14 Fiery Furnaces albums in the
past eight years, and his solo career began with
2006’s Winter Women and Holy Ghost Language
School.
His latest solo excursion is epic, to say the least;
aptly dubbed Solos, it’s an eight-album subscription series (vinyl LPs, no CD or digital releases),
the initial six dedicated to a single instrument. Napoleonette, the first album in the series, explores
the piano with a weird pop vengeance, folding in
the quirky sugar buzz of 10cc, Todd Rundgren and
Ben Folds, the percussive free jazz schizophonia
of Sun Ra and Tom Waits, and a lyrical perspective that would give head scratching pause to Dan
Bejar and Robyn Hitchcock. Napoleonette is wildly
sophisticated, wonderfully strange and the first of
eight this year; there’s a whole lot of Friedberger
going on. —Brian Baker
Lia Ices

Grown Unknown
Jagjaguwar

Cool as ices
With mostly subdued, easily
digestible songs and a voice somewhere between
the eight-figure Irish dyad of Sinead O’Connor

33

THE

reviews

and Dolores O’Riordan, it’d be easy to dismiss
Brooklyn singer-songwriter Lia Ices as a mere
coffeehouse careerist destined for a lifetime
of Starbucks compilations and Lilith Fairs, forever chasing the overpriced hemlines of Sarah
McLachlan and Tori Amos. But really, we feel
gross and vaguely ashamed for even mentioning all those tired middle-aged opiates in the
same sentence as Ms. Ices. Her second and latest album, Grown Unknown, quietly transcends
the mainstream female singer-pianist paradigm
at almost every turn.
Opener “Love Is Won” serves as a showpiece
for Ices’ celestial voice and spare playing, a melancholy slow burn that builds to an ethereal hook.
“Daphne,” a duet with Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon, is
a bucolic country lament that moans and swells
in weary delirium. Meanwhile, the title track—
replete with strings, an acoustic guitar and extensive handclaps—is a pop revelation, a song
that somehow sparkles without being happy or
even upbeat. How does she do it? Carefully, we
suspect. —J. Bennett

Isolée

Well Spent Youth
Pampa

Monstrous no longer
The last Isolée album, We Are
Monster, was a watershed for minimal techno and
a richly deserving crossover success, injecting
unprecedented warmth, melody and personality
into the genre’s steely sphere and presaging the
so-called “maximalist” likes of Gui Boratto. Six
years on, Rajko Müller’s third full-length reverts
to the comparatively mild, mannered microhouse
of his first (2000’s Rest), but it’s markedly chillier
and far less engaging.
Despite the intriguingly woozy claustrophobia
and jagged, intermittent funk bass incursions of
opener “Paloma Triste”—a twisted Prince allusion in both title and sound—there’s maddeningly little to hold on to here. Müller hasn’t lost
his attentiveness to fine detail—his sonic fingerprinting is still readily recognizable—but, at least
in this context, these tracks mostly seem to meander aimlessly, with too little of his trademark
tunefulness (the Monster-lite of “Taktell” and the
wanly pretty “Celeste” are paltry exceptions) to
save Youth from being a competent but ultimately
drab, generic drag. —K. Ross Hoffman
Joan as Police
Woman

The Deep Field
101

Arresting developments
“Deep” is a good adjective for the third album
by the inimitable, unfathomable Joan Wasser.
So are: thick, loose, rich, raw, murky, dangerous
and, without a doubt, sexy. Also, patient. It’s not

34

nearly as immediate as her immaculate, crystalline debut, Real Life—tellingly, with just as many
songs, it’s 20 minutes longer. Gone are the achingly spare piano ballads; in their place is another
sort of ache, the kind that sprawls out over gritty,
slow-boiling funk and organ-drenched soul, or—
in the case of “Flash”—eight minutes of pensive,
amniotic floating.
Nothing’s under four minutes; the shortest
cut, first single “Magic,” is taut and buoyant
enough to scan as pop, but much of Field veers far
from conventional singer-songwriter fare. This is
a songwriter’s record—indeed, it’s a powerfully
frank treatise on love, lust and positivity—but
it’s also an astonishing vocal showcase, a rapturous mood piece and a killer blowing session.
Wasser’s versatility and fearlessness call to
mind another Joan—the likewise underheralded
Armatrading—but what she’s concocted here is
something entirely her own. —K. Ross Hoffman

The Joy Formidable

The Big Roar
Atlantic

Feel good hit of the
bummer
The only reason this isn’t a 10 is that there’s no
way one of these songs doesn’t wind up in, like,
a Cingular or Prius ad within a year. That’s how
hard I’ve fallen for The Big Roar, and we’re talking
first-spin love, which is brain-scrambling to the
point of perhaps rendering your humble scribe
untrustworthy. Almost.
The Joy Formidable are a Welsh pop-gaze
trio—the guitarist/frontlady Ritzy Bryan (I
know…) and bassist/occasional singer Rhydian
Dafydd have been refining their shit in assorted
incarnations since 2007. It worked. The moment
Bryan’s icy wail infiltrates the modest new-wave
lope of leadoff “The Everchanging Spectrum of a
Lie,” you’ll think neat, sounds like Lush. Cue endless, righteous, gorgeous avalanches of overdrive
reminiscent of pretty much every unsung ’90s
alt-rock band (Hum, Swervedriver, Failure),
heartfelt but never cloying overtures (“I Don’t
Want to See You Like This,” “A Heavy Abacus”)
and the anthem to every fuck yeah moment you’ll
have this year (“Cradle”). —Andrew Bonazelli
MEN

Talk About Body
IAMSOUND

More dance about body…
well, both really
You might remember JD Samson as the most
willfully androgynous member of Le Tigre, the
person of whom indie dorks who wanted to see
Kathleen Hanna said, “Wait, is that a dude or
what?” MEN is Samson’s new gender-futz project, all synth beats and post-punk guitar flickering in here and there, a post-disco, post-gender

party where everyone gets to dance this mess
around, possibly while deconstructing everything
in sight.
It’s more fun than it sounds, but not that much
more, for reasons that have nothing to do with
the radical feminism and everything to do with
sameness of the songs. Lines like “Radical politics / Sontag in the crib” and “Take your shirts
off / don’t take your shirt off” are funnier and
cannier than they sound if the beats, rhymes and
life are there. One wishes for synth pop that was
as progressive as the politics. —Joe Gross

Mi Ami

Dolphins
Thrill Jockey

I hear that you and your
band sold your guitars…
Last year’s Steal Your Face was sorely underrated,
a chaotic, kinetic flail, the sound of dance punk
falling ass-over-tea-kettle down the stairs and
making it sound like it was intentional. But now
that bassist Jacob Long has left the building,
founding Ami(s?) Damon Palermo and Daniel
Martin-McCormick are going electronic, Palermo
rocking the drum machine and samples, MartinMcCormick on scream and keys.
In keeping with their punk past, this machine
music was cut live, which was a smart move—
Martin-McCormick’s weird wail sounds trapped
in these four tracks of electro thud and twitch,
a Tron character stuck in a 1982 mainframe, a
little 5 a.m. hangover here (“Sunrise”), some
disco panic there (“Echo”). Your move, Ghostland Observatory. —Joe Gross
Monotonix

Not Yet

Drag City

Hair apparent
For an all-encompassing
live experience, Monotonix can’t be beat. Once
you’ve had a chance to live in that moment,
there’s no going back; maybe that’s why listening to Monotonix getting wild ‘n’ wooly on record
will always pale somewhat to seeing the Israeli
trio skirt the edge of disaster in concert.
But while many bands strive to capture the
primordial punk sound of Raw Power/Fun Houseera Stooges, few do it with the sweet, sweaty
inspiration of Monotonix. Singer Ami Shalev goes
the full Iggy on the group’s second full-length Not
Yet: “Fun Fun Fun” is a modern-day counterpart
to the Stooges’ “No Fun,” while “Everything That
I See” opens with a throat-clearing cough that
sets up a series of unseemly vocal contortions.
The pace flags slightly on the languorous “Late
Night,” but the rest of Not Yet—three chords
or less in three minutes or less—features the
band’s most undeniably groovy work to date.
—Nick Green

NEeMA

Watching You Think
Tonality

A Different
Kind of Bends
Radiohead withdraws into
alluring minimalism

R

adiohead are most interesting when

they’re in retreat. To reconcile the consumerist
commentary and commercial success of their
The King
1997 prog opus OK Computer, the band went inward, withof Limbs
drawing into Kid A’s haunting world of cold minimalism and
existential crises. The album was their first, best statement
self-released
of the 21st century, and the years since have been beset by
diminishing returns. The fanatical reception of 2007’s In Rainbows might have
positioned Radiohead as leaders of the industry’s new school, but that album will
ultimately be remembered for its effect on retail dynamics, not its actual music.
Once again on the heels of a commercial success, we see the band side-stepping
the limelight on The King of Limbs—in the process, making their most satisfying
work in a decade. At first, the album seems a collage of skittery beats, staccato synthesizers, vocal samples and space, anchored by two superb songs (that’s two more
than the last album had): the nervy “Morning Mr. Magpie” and the unexpectedly
optimistic closer “Separator.” The whip-beat single “Lotus Flower” doesn’t impress with its dull take on dependence (“I can’t kick your habit”), while other tracks
(“Bloom,” “Feral”) are instrumental drivel. But Limbs rewards repeat listens.
“Little by Little” emerges as a clockwork groove in step with singer Thom
Yorke’s solo outing “Black Swan,” sexy but neurotic: “I’m such a tease and you’re
such a flirt / Once you’ve been around you’ve been around enough.” Yorke later
wails to an empty hall in the solo piano number “Cortex” (call it chamber-soul)
and gets vulnerable on “Give Up the Ghost,” the couplet “Don’t haunt me / Don’t
hurt me” repeated in alluring harmonies over the background. At eight songs and
37 minutes, it is indeed the band’s shortest work, but you could hardly call it diminished. Rather, The King of Limbs is the sharpest and most accessible showcase
of Radiohead’s efforts to skirt convention. —John Vettese
Radiohead

photo by sebastian edge

Leonard says, relax
Even in adult-contemporary,
winning the endorsement of a 76-year-old doesn’t
count for much currency in the cred department.
But when said elder is Leonard Cohen, people tend
to take notice—and in the case of the living legend’s protégé, NEeMA, they probably should.
Produced “in association with Cohen” by Pierre
Marchand (Sarah McLachlan, Rufus Wainwright),
NEeMA’s sophomore effort, Watching You Think,
shows the Canadian (of Egyptian and Lebanese
descent) songstress deftly navigating folk and
world-infused singer-songwriter pop, inching dangerously close to the middle of the road
without giving in to cringe-worthy clichés. From
ruminative, finger-picked ballads (“Running”) to
airy sing-alongs (“Escape”) and country weepers
(“Sidewalk”), the record’s open, shimmering production and NEeMA’s smoky, sanguine delivery
result in a sundry and satisfying long-player for
lovelorn listeners who hanker for smart, bohemian
pop and poetic lyrics, but don’t want their boat
rocked too hard. —Adam Gold
New York Dolls

Dancing Backwards in
High Heels
429

Too much too late
Without going into the whole history of the New
York Dolls and why the glam-punk pioneers were
so damn special, let’s just say it was a big deal that
their thrilling pants-on-fire appeal crossed over to
their second incarnation. Since reforming in 2004,
the Dolls, with David Johansen and Sylvain Sylvain as the only living members (Arthur Kane died
shortly after the reunion), peeled off two fresh
and bawdy rock ‘n’ roll albums. But now we have
Dancing Backward in High Heels, produced by Louis
XIV’s Jason Hill. Man, what happened?
Spector-lite arrangements, schlocky island
flavors, terrifyingly scarce electric guitar licks,
and a lackluster performance by Johansen make
the band sound ready for shuffleboard and piña
coladas. The lively “Round and Round She Goes”
has reassuring vital stats, and “I’m So Fabulous”
throws down on hipster carpetbaggers with
trademark sass, but it would be more effective
if the Dolls didn’t sound like a cruise-ship band.
—Jeanne Fury
Parts & Labor

Constant Future
Jagjaguwar

The chaotic melodicism of
an exploding music box
When Parts & Labor sprang to life nearly a decade
ago, it was a noisy experimental side project for
electronic noodler Dan Friel and bassist B.J. Warshaw, the musical monster stitched together by a
pair of weirdly simpatico mad sonic scientists. The

35

THE

reviews

lurching path from that lightning-struck birth has
increasingly proven that melodic classicism can coexist with barely tethered noise rock, each one inexplicably feeding and complementing the other.
Three years after the emodelic majesty of Receivers, P&L return with Constant Future, a more
finely-tuned post rock/prog/pop masterwork of
epic proportions that manages to sound grand
without being grandiose. Just as King Crimson’s
bombast was leavened by Adrian Belew’s whimsical gravity, Parts & Labor combine serious execution with a wicked left field sensibility to create a
sound that hints at Jawbox’s punk anthemics and
Wire’s pop anarchy. Constant Future is uncompromisingly accessible, Parts & Labor’s perfect storm
of experimental texturalism and structured rock
chaos. —Brian Baker

Corinne Bailey Rae

The Love EP
Capitol

Compromising position
Corinne Bailey Rae clearly
knows how to make the best of a bad situation.
Steeped in grief over the loss of her husband to
a drug overdose, last year’s The Sea found the
singer-songwriter largely shelving her 2006 debut’s breezy neo-soul in favor of a wide-ranging
approach and potential escape from adult contemporary limbo.
With The Love EP’s five covers, she takes four
steps back. Sure, Rae’s delivery is impeccable as
usual, to the extent that she pretty much brandjacks Prince’s “I Wanna Be Your Lover.” Arrange-

struggling to get her music heard. Only
after Mary Chapin Carpenter took Williams’ “PassionBlessed
ate Kisses” to the top of the country charts in 1993
did people start paying attention. She nabbed a Best
Lost Highway
Contemporary Folk Album Grammy for Car Wheels
on a Gravel Road in 1999, and she’s been going from strength to strength
ever since.
Blessed is a strong contender for Williams’ best album. She’s in top
form here, her raw, bluesy voice moving from a soulful growl to a desolate purr on a solid collection that continues to shine a bit of light into
the darkest corners of the human condition. “Seeing Black” is a song
to a friend who committed suicide that’s equal parts grief and rage.
On “I Don’t Know How You’re Livin’,” Williams watches another

36

ments are crisp and clever, too. The fault resides
in the singer’s choice of material: With one exception, tightening her grip on the Norah Jones
demographic seems Rae’s number-one priority.
That exception—a lurching, erotically charged
rendition of Belly’s “Low Red Moon”—hints both
at what might have been and what might yet still
be. —Rod Smith

Rainbow Arabia

Boys and Diamonds
Kompaqt

Poly-ethnic breakfast club
soundtrack
Tiffany Preston is at her Third World-tourista best
when puking up lyrics like a woman possessed

friend going down the tubes, despite all the love
and care she’s offered. Her anguished vocal here
is mirrored by Val McCallum’s weeping pedal
steel. “Awakening” is a deeply spiritual song
about unfolding the soul to embrace the endless possibilities of life and love. It starts quietly
and builds to a dramatic conclusion. “Kiss Like
Your Kiss,” which got a Grammy nod for its inclusion on the True Blood soundtrack, is more
subdued, given a shimmering summer aura by
subtle keyboards, measured bass
notes and a breathless, undulating guitar line.
Blessed is also being released
in a special two-disc edition.
The second disc includes the
demos for all the songs on
the album, recorded in
Williams’ kitchen, the
place where she does
most of her writing.
—j. poet

over the synthesizer-splattered ephedrine pop
she and hubby Danny brew at their Los Angeles
home. Rings on their fingers and bells on their
toes, the Prestons stage post-Gang Gang Dance
felicities like benign WWE battle royales. Why
settle for pitting delirious hand-percussive flurries against organ hiccups and buzzing bass keyboards when clucking xylophones and bonkers
sampler effects could really set a smelting-pot
party off right?
While long-awaited full-length Boys and Diamonds doesn’t quite hit the breezy, bungee-jumble
sweet spot early single “Holiday in Congo” did, it’s
a tropical(ia) delight nonetheless. “Jungle Bear”
sets off at a kind of wan, irradiated twee-trot,
while the keeling “Hai” pulls a Drunken Master,
all sloshed, crab-walking swagger and nano-blip
blizzard. “Blind” bobs blithely by on needle-sharp
guitars, synths compressed to croaking throbs
and Tiffany’s all-out commitment to a put-on
accent that’s a bastardization of a dozen put-on
accents. —Raymond Cummings

Rival Schools

Pedals

Photo Finish

Reattaching the training
wheels
United by Fate would’ve been an interesting bookend to the music career of Walter Schreifels.
Starting with late ’80s hardcore outfit Gorilla Biscuits, he went on to front the seminal Quicksand
through the ’90s. Rival Schools’ lone release then
seemed like a proper indie rock coda in 2001.
But Schreifels continued, dabbling in pure pop
and folk, and is now back with sophomore effort,
Pedals, as if the last decade never existed.
While a preferred alternative to his more recent endeavors, this is still light fare, a nostalgic
romp seemingly tailored towards acolytes of
Jimmy Eat World’s Bleed American. There aren’t
any embarrassing grasps for relevance, but the
material isn’t strong enough to justify being so
out of step.
Schreifels has put out some incredibly important records, but he seems to have lost his bearings. If resuscitating Rival Schools is an attempt
to refocus, Pedals is little more than a warm-up.
—Shane Mehling
Caitlin Rose

Own Side Now
Theory 8

Sanding the edges
As a teenager playing under
the moniker “Save Macaulay the Band,” Caitlin
Rose wowed at Nashville’s top local rock clubs.
Already an accomplished singer-songwriter
with an agile voice and precocious charm, Rose
masterfully synthesized trad country whimsy
and adolescent snarl. Now, more than five years
later, comes Own Side Now, a debut full-length
crafted with an astounding amount of patience
and grace.
In those intervening years, Rose cultivated that

photo by dustin adams

love for classic country, dulling down the youthful
bite in favor of lilting melodies and increasingly
assured vocals. Standout tracks include the slow
burn melancholy of “Things Change,” the bang-up
breakup ballad “Song for Rabbits”—her invocation of “routine disaster” one of the album’s many
lovely lyrical moments—and the acoustic swing
of “Shanghai Cigarettes.” Now a wise and weary
22, Rose exhibits an exhilarating level of subtlety
and intelligence in her music. —Lee Stabert

Six Organs of
Admittance

Asleep on the Floodplain
Drag City

Rather ripping
With each passing Six Organs of Admittance record, mainman Ben Chasny affirms two common
critiques of his oeuvre: he’s a badass guitarist and
a pretty crappy singer. Lucky for us, his hyperprolific career has mostly counteracted the latter
with his excellence at the former. Asleep on the
Floodplain is no different, and the sweet licks are
as sweet as ever.
The songs still suffer when he sings over them,
though. The vocals on “Hold but Let Go” and
“Light of the Light” are distracting when, given
the fluidity of everything going on underneath
them, they might otherwise be ignorable. Still,
there are asides like “Saint of the Fisherman” and
“Poppies” where Chasny flaunts his mastery of
the fretboard with simple statements, boiling
bass and melodic lines down to the work of two
hands.
But the very best of the Six Organs repertoire is long, trippy and trance-inducing songs,
and Floodplain delivers a shining example on the
album’s centerpiece, “S/word and Leviathan.”
—Matt Sullivan
The Sounds

Something to Die For
SideOneDummy

Hearts of glass
For their fourth album, Sweden’s Sounds have set up a permanent residence
on the dance floor. While previous releases have
approached new wave via rock ‘n’ roll’s traditional
guitar/bass/drums, Something to Die For is saturated in electronica. This is full-throttle moveyour-ass inspired.
Fuzzed-out synths, echo effects and jittery
shakers dominate; the bright beats create momentum that swirls rather than charges in a
straight path. “Together we conquer our planet
with dance,” sings Maja Ivarsson on “Dance With
the Devil.” The uplifting sentiment hovers over
a few songs, but Ivarsson also has her eye on
lovers, both good and bad. “It’s not me, it’s you”
she seethes on the bitter “The No No Song,” but
“Diana” implores a girl to stay the night, amid
a hard-driving snare and squalling guitars that
craft sharp edges and a smeared, messy center.
Such infectious tunes make modern new wave
something to live for. —Jeanne Fury

John Vanderslice

White Wilderness
Merge

Blizzard beast
John Vanderslice has
brought in reinforcements. Long a solo studio
whiz, the singer-songwriter teamed up with the
Magik*Magik Orchestra for his latest, White Wilderness. The 19-member collective of classically
trained musicians, under the guidance of maestro
Minna Choi, is based in the Bay Area; the album’s
nine tracks were captured live over the course of
just three days.
The collaboration is a fruitful one—Vanderslice’s traditional studio virtuosity (he’s also an
accomplished producer, working with indie stalwarts including Spoon and Mountain Goats) has
been replaced with a different sort of acumen. The
orchestra’s lush textures add a layer of sophisticated atmospherics that perfectly complement
Vanderslice’s understated delivery and evocative
lyrics. The title track is an ideal example, as talk
of falling snow and obscured paths is mirrored in
delicate waves of piano and violin. —Lee Stabert
Wagon Christ

Toomorrow

Ninja Tune

Waiting for the miracle
So, let’s see: playful, anachronistic layering of samples; cheeky track titles;
stoner sense of humor—sounds like old-school
bedroom electronic producer Luke Vibert’s up
to his aging tricks again. Back in the day, Vibert,
alongside Aphex Twin and µ-ziq, constituted the
first line of defense against mainfloor dance music’s rigorous formulas. Yet on Toomorrow, Vibert’s
first release under his Wagon Christ persona in
seven years, he sounds like he’s falling back on
the same eccentric m.o. that has characterized his
work since the ’90s.
To be sure, Vibert’s productions still retain a
cockeyed charm. “Ain’t He Heavy, He’s My Brother” lopes along with an engagingly soulful gait,
and the album closes with the effectively somber
“Mr. Mukatsuku.” But the cleverness wears off
by the midpoint of most of these tracks. Indeed,
electronica stands still for no one, not even its
pioneers. —Justin Hampton
Abigail Washburn

City of Refuge

Foreign Children/
Rounder

Pop goes the bluegrass
Washburn grew up playing bluegrass banjo, but
a job in Chengdu introduced her to Chinese folk
music, which had surprising similarities to the music she loved. Her previous albums flirted with a
fusion of Chinese folk and bluegrass, and while the
credits here mention Wu Fei’s guzheng (Chinese
zither) and throat singing by the Beijing-based
Mongolian folk band Hanggai, their contributions
are buried in the mix.

37

THE

reviews

Although her long vocal lines may still reveal a
Chinese influence at times, the songs Washburn
wrote for this album are more folk pop, despite the
often troubling lyrics. “City of Refuge” and “Last
Train” have a mellow Fleetwood Mac feel, while
“Devine Bell” is an almost tongue-in-cheek bit of
bluegrass-tinged gospel. Washburn takes a more
traditional approach on “Dreams of Nectar,” the
familiar tale of a refugee crushed by the American dream, and “Bright Morning Stars,” an aching
spiritual balanced between resignation and resurrection. —j. poet

Win Win

Win Win
Vice

They are the champions
Brooklyn producer Alex Epton, a.k.a. XXXChange, is famous for his work with
rapper Spank Rock, Bloc Party vocalist Kele’s solo
album, and remixes of Björk and Thom Yorke, but
Win Win is where he steps out as a beat-head auteur. Win Win are a trio with Chris Devlin (Devlin
& Darko) and Ghostdad, and their debut gives the
sense of a notebook (or maybe a MacBook Pro)
full of ideas being flipped through loosely.
This being a producer’s album, there are nine
guests credited: fans of Danger Mouse should
try “Pop a Gumball,” which features Spank Rock,
Andrew W.K. and DJ Matt Sweeney of WNYU’s
Beats in Space mix show, but the track’s taut
rockiness is far removed from what you’d associate with any of those three. Ditto “Victim,” which
filters Baltimore club vet Blaqstarr’s sung vocal
in swampy guitar and heavily distorted bass and
drums like late ’90s big beat gone all the way rock.
—Michaelangelo Matos
Wolf + Lamb
vs. Soul Clap

DJ-Kicks
K7

Houses of low culture
New York’s Wolf + Lamb and Boston’s Soul Clap
are a pair of DJ-producer duos who make and play
a pronouncedly new-era version of classic East
Coast deep house, the soul-rooted, purist strain
that for decades had been primarily the preserve
of older dancers. Wolf + Lamb and Soul Clap’s joint
volume of the DJ-Kicks series concentrates almost
entirely on artists and recordings from within their
homegrown scenes—unusual for DJ-Kicks, which
tends to be where selectors stretch out.
Its synergy works nicely: Not everything is great
(you’re not going to run out and hunt down an
unmixed version of W+L ft. Smirk’s “Therapist”),
but the languid tempos and floating instrumental ambience are invitingly cozy. And a number
of things do make you look up: W+L’s remix of
H-Foundation ft. Aion’s “Tonight,” the neo-soul
detour of “In the Park” by Sect ft. Ben Westbeech,

Citizens on patrol
Andy Stack and Jenn Wasner,
the partnership behind Wye Oak, are masters of
dynamics. Their latest, Civilian, swoops and crashes, swells and whispers. Wasner’s voice is the perfect accent—sweet and pretty, yet willful enough
to compete with the band’s occasional cacophony.
Tracks like the rangy, dissonant “Dog Eyes” oscillate between nifty pop shuffle and jagged, somber
guitar work, building to a wondrous conflagration
of sound. The opening thrum of “Plains” lulls with
its delicate melancholia before building to insistent
punctuations of noise.
Meanwhile the album’s opener, “Two Small
Deaths,” is a swoony gem, augmented by the hum
of reverb and an insistent bassline. This Baltimore
duo continues to craft beautiful, challenging music, elevated by genuinely exquisite moments—a
wistful melody or act of restraint that surprises
and delights. Stuff this smart and accomplished
should be enough to inspire aspiring bands with
anemic ideas to hang up their guitars for good.
—Lee Stabert
Yelle

Safari Disco Club
EMI

Watch out for that…
Not quite the wild, equatorial
jungle party its title suggests, Safari Disco Club
doesn’t trek terribly far afield from the sweet
‘n’ spunky synth-pop of Yelle’s 2007 debut. If
anything, Safari is actually less animalistic than
its predecessor, lacking the harder edge of Pop-

Up’s gritty, electro-laced hip-hop cuts—the trio’s
eponymous vocalist generally sticks to singing
rather than rapping, though she’s still as sprightly
as ever.
The newly polished, more melodically focused
approach makes a decently effective trade-off,
yielding pleasantly fluffy roller-disco gems like
the sparkle-eyed “J’ai Bu” (strangely reminiscent
of Sally Shapiro), even if the best cuts here—the
enjoyably loopy title song; the pumping fidgethouse of “Comme Un Enfant”—are often the leanest and meanest. Still, despite an occasional oversaturation of generically glossy, faceless synths,
you’d be hard-pressed to find a more propulsive,
exuberant set of icily retro electro-pop this side
of La Roux. And those poseurs aren’t even French!
—K. Ross Hoffman

Yuck

Yuck

Fat Possum

Gross profit
Despite a moniker that conjures who-cares sludge, the young Brits in Yuck
hark back to the kinds of homespun, enthusiastic
guitar records people liked ’90s indie rock for in
the first place, because that’s what it largely consisted of then. Sometimes it’s power-pop dressed
up in grungy clothes, but faster and hookier, with
the whiz-bang sides of Built to Spill and Teenage
Fanclub coming out strongly as the tempos rev
(“Georgia”), and a Yo La Tengo-ish drift in the
lonesome-slide-guitar-driven “Suck.”
Nominally, Yuck are a quartet, but their secret
weapon—beyond guitars with the kind of scrappy
texture college radio DJs go quietly nuts for—is
their fifth member, Ilana (the bio dispenses with
last names), the sister of lead singer/guitarist Daniel, whose chiming, winning harmonies
give the whole thing just that much more depth.
—Michaelangelo Matos

HOT
TRACKS
TEN TO REMEMBER
IN STORES 3/15

The

IN STORES 3/8

Joy Formidable

The Big Roar

Lupe Fiasco

Lykke Li

Lasers

Wounded Rhymes

IN STORES 3/8

DevilDriver

Wye Oak

PJ Harvey

avril lavigne

Beast

Civilian

Let England Shake

Goodby Lullaby

IN STORES 3/15

Beady Eye
Different Gear,
Still Speeding

Strong
Arm Steady
Arms & Hammers

New York Dolls
Dancing Backward
in High Heels

FEATURING LIAM, ANDY
AND JEM FROM OASIS

39

No, itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s not a cheesesteak
Mark Bittman with a
chocolate, olive oil and salt
baguette sandwich from
Addyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s in Portland, OR.

ark Bittman is “The Minimalist” no more. After spending 13 years exploring no-frills

home cooking in his New York Times food column, the author and journalist has moved
on to a fresh challenge: a weekly slot in the Times’ Opinion section, a platform for him to
discuss the far-reaching food issues that influence what ends up on the American dinner
table. (He will continue to write about cooking for New York Times Magazine.) Cowbell
touched base with Bittman to talk big ideas—all while he prepped a cumin- and chiliscented stir-fry of veggies, brown rice and black beans in his New York City home.

Can you pinpoint an exact moment
when you knew you were going to
end “The Minimalist” and move into
this new role?

It never occurred to me that I could make it
happen until [the fall of 2010]. I pitched the
[new] column to the Opinion people, and
they liked the idea. At the same time, the
Magazine was going through changes, and
the new editor wanted me to take over that
[cooking] column. What an opportunity.
The op-ed column… it’s an idea whose
time had come, and I consider myself fortunate to have been in a position to pitch
it. I was maybe a week ahead of the curve.
[Laughs] If it hadn’t been me, it would’ve
been someone else. It’s something that
should be happening. The way I pitched it
was to say, “Food, like economics, like politics, touches everybody’s life, all the time.
It’s the prism through which you can look

“

at anything you want to look at.” Having
been writing about food for a long time and
having been making noise increasingly in
the policy world… I’m sort of trying to walk
a line between modesty and immodesty
with this, I guess. [Laughs] But it’s not as
if I’m not qualified to do this.
How do you define your role now? What
is your responsibility, your vocation?

It’s clear that I’m interested in food policy and what’s right and wrong in the food
world. That’s what I want to be doing.
Whether it becomes a political column is
a long-term thing… or whether it becomes
more personal and lighthearted, that’s all
down the road. I’d like to think it becomes
many different things—not only a weekly
analysis of policy or current events, but
a discussion of food in the broadest, and
hopefully truest, sense.

The government is reacting to where
the money and pressure is coming
from. Most decisions that come from
government agencies seem to be wrong
about food, and wrong about everything
that concerns consumers.” —mark bittman

One thing I struggle with, as far as
the American diet goes, is how much
responsibility falls on policymakers
to shape how we eat, and how much
responsibility falls on the individual
to get educated and seek out sustainable choices. Is there a specific split
there in your mind?

Sadly, it’s entirely up to individuals to
press the government to do the right thing.
It’s the government’s role to make the food
supply better. That needs to happen, [but]
it’s increasingly clear that will not happen
without us pushing them. It’s up to us to
change diets and educate ourselves. It’s all
on us. The Feds are under so much corporate pressure; they’re not going to make
positive change unless they’re pushed by
people. And I’m not sure I would’ve said
that six months ago, but things have gotten
worse-looking.
The government is not acting for or responding to the needs of its citizens—it’s
acting and responding to the needs of its
corporate benefactors. Money is coming
from the corporations, but not enough
pressure is coming from citizens. The government is reacting to where the money
and pressure is coming from. Most decisions that come from government agencies seem to be wrong about food, and
wrong about everything that concerns
consumers. How do you change that?
41

A California woman recently filed a
lawsuit against Nutella, claiming she
was duped by an advertising claim
that it was “part of a balanced breakfast.” What is your opinion on this
approach to hold a company accountable for duplicitous marketing?

I think the corporations do need to be
held responsible for misleading advertising. That’s part of the problem here. There
are a bunch of people in the media, in the
public arena and NGOs who are on the
right side of this struggle, but most have
no money to speak of. Meanwhile, advertising, marketing and lobbying budgets are
in the hundreds of millions of dollars. The
people we need to look at are the cereal
companies and McDonald’s and fast food
companies—big food conglomerates.
Look, all marketing is intentionally misleading. Here’s the thing: If you write that
you should do away with Happy Meals, a
certain amount of people will say it’s a parent’s problem, parents need to be teaching their children. But parents are just as
susceptible to marketing as anybody else.
It’s trying to sell stuff to people who don’t
need it, or trying to get you to buy more of
stuff you do need. It’s about trying to sell
stuff, targeting both children and adults.
It’s very difficult to say to your kids, “Don’t
eat at McDonald’s” when you yourself have
been sold on eating at McDonald’s. It’s
tough to say “Don’t eat Cinnamon Toast
Crunch” when you yourself are eating Reese’s Peanut Butter Puffs.
In your mind, what is the worst eating habit Americans have, and how
would you suggest we break it?

That’s simple: We eat too many animal
products. Even worse than processed
food, though it’s not a huge gap, is the animal product thing. We should be growing
food for people first, animals second. And
cars, by the way, third.
What’s it going to take to fundamentally change the American attitude
toward eating? You’ve mentioned
the formation of a “Civilian Cooking
Corps” in your new column. What
is that?

I do think that people are legitimately busy,
and people don’t have the cooking skills,
and that’s really a deadly combo. You can’t
really have an impact on how busy people
are, but you can encourage and teach them
42

“

It’s very difficult to say to your
kids, ‘Don’t eat at McDonald’s’
when you yourself have been sold on
eating at McDonald’s. It’s tough to say
‘Don’t eat Cinnamon Toast Crunch’ when
you yourself are eating Reese’s Peanut
Butter Puffs.” —mark bittman
that cooking is a high priority. There needs
to be an ongoing campaign heralding the
joys of cooking, if you will—and the rewards of it. Food needs to be affordable
and sustainable, as we know, and available.
Then people need the skills to put those
things together. They need to want to cook,
have the ingredients they need, and they
need to have the skills. That would be the
aim of the Civilian Cooking Corps. It’s funny—I’ve received maybe a dozen e-mails
saying, “We’re already doing that, here’s
our program.” It’s really quite cool.
There’s this huge corps of unemployed
people. You start a program where unemployed people are trained how to cook, and
trained how to cook for other people. They
have two jobs: to cook for people who are
unable to do it for themselves, and to teach
other people how to cook. Someone will
say that’s pie in the sky. Fine. But if you end
corporate subsidies on commodity foods,
you have a lot of money floating around
that can be put to good use for a change.
In your debut Op-Ed column, you lay
out “A Food Manifesto for the Future,”
but point out that many of the ideas
are “frequently discussed, but sadly
not yet implemented.” So what’s it
going to take to implement them?
What’s the first step?

The [government-issued agricultural]
subsidies thing gets back to that discussion. That’s huge. If we could take some
of this money and turn it toward education, that would be even bigger. Ending
subsidies would be a form of taxation on
Big Food, taking away their ability to produce junk food cheaply. The price of some
food—lousy food—would go up, and that’s
not entirely a bad thing.

Speaking of prices: The argument I
see coming up time and time again in
the “real food vs. frankenfood” debate
is money. While it’s our hope that
every citizen gains access to sustainable foods, I foresee many struggling
to afford to systematically change
how/what they eat. How do you tackle this looming question of cost?

Look, people worldwide manage to eat better than we do with less money. I get that
it’s difficult for people to get to and from
real markets, and that’s a huge issue, one
that has to be resolved. And surely real food
is too expensive for many people. That’s
why we need to subsidize food—and cooking, for that matter—for people who legitimately can’t afford it. We already do that, to
some extent, but that’s one federal program
that needs more, not less, money.
Is it an altogether good thing that
Walmart, America’s largest, most influential retailer, has teamed up with
First Lady Michelle Obama to push
for healthier food and more product
transparency? Or should we as consumers be wary of this move?

Both. Well, not altogether a good thing, but
on the whole, better rather than not. Retailers are different from producers. They
can make money selling whatever you want
to buy. You want to buy canned tomatoes?
Fine. You want to buy Snickers? They don’t
care. But the people who make Snickers
cannot make canned tomatoes. In other
words, Walmart is agnostic as to whether
they sell you crap or real food—food you
can use to cook. They’ll figure out a way to
make money either way. On the other hand,
the alliance to produce “better” processed
food? This I could do without.

Ending
Junk Mail
by Felicia D’Ambrosio

F

orty-one pounds. That’s how
much the average American
household will receive annually
in postal junk mail—not including unsolicited catalogs, handbills
and phone books. According to
the EPA’s most recent Municipal Solid
Waste Facts and Figures report, paper
and paperboard made up 31 percent
of the municipal solid waste stream in
2008. Even though paper is easily recycled in most communities, only about 43
million of the 77 million tons generated
in 2008 were recovered for recycling.
Thus, source reduction—keeping goods
out of the waste stream by not generating them—is far more effective than
waste reduction, a.k.a. recycling.

Reduce your junk mail and prevent marketers from sharing your information by
writing “Do not sell or rent my information” any time you send in a warranty, sign
up for a contest, or provide your name and
address anywhere. Since a national Do Not
Mail list is not yet a reality, use the methods below to beat junk mail’s primary offenders at their game. A comprehensive
treatment costs less than half an hour on
the Web, and is guaranteed pain-free.
Credit Card and
Insurance Offers
TransUnion, Experian and Equifax, better
known as the Big Three credit reporting
agencies, supply their mailing lists to the
credit card and insurance companies felling forests to send you limitless plastic opportunity. Call 1-888-5-OPTOUT (1-888567-8688) to cease receiving pre-screened

illustration by melissa mcfeeters

offers for five years. The 24-hour recorded
message will ask for your name, address,
phone and social security number, which
is creepy but legitimate in this case. Credit
reporting agencies already have this information and use it for verification.
Phone Directories
Though it may make it harder to find a
plumber in a blackout or boost the vertically challenged at the dining room table,
visiting yellowpagesoptout.com lets you
quit receiving Verizon directories, Yellow
and White Pages, after registering and responding to a verification email.
Catalogs
Have your mailing label handy when calling the customer service phone number
of companies sending unwanted or duplicate catalogs. If you’d only like to receive

a certain number of catalogs per year, let
the representative know how many. This
approach also works for specific-source
junk mail that defies categorization.
Direct Mail Marketing
The Direct Marketing Association represents nearly 3,600 companies utilizing
direct-mail marketing. In the interest of
responding to junk-mail concerns, they
maintain DMAChoice.org, where consumers can register to be removed from
their members’ mailing lists. Supply your
name, address and a credit card number—you won’t be charged, and all info is
confidential—to manage mail choices for
catalogs, donation solicitations, magazine
and credit card offers from national (but
not local) marketers.

43

/movies

Love Your Work*
The Women of Big Love triangulate their
fire with grace and subtlety / by Joe Gross

E

xcellent acting ensembles thrive on two things: good bal-

ance between cast members and the patina of positive peer
pressure. A good ensemble cast can be prevented from being
a great one if one actor is clearly operating on a different
wavelength from the others. Homicide: Life on the Street had
a world-beating cast packed with actors doing smart, often
subtle work that was nonetheless dominated by the screen-filling,
stage-acting presence of Andre Braugher as Det. Frank Pembleton.
And a balanced cast can be prevented from achieving greatness
if everyone seems to be playing their positions all the time. Even
with Jennifer Aniston’s subsequent fame, the cast of Friends was
pretty evenly matched. But you never got the impression they were
pushing each other with their performances.

Then there is Big Love. It sounds like a
joke: For all five seasons, Big Love has featured most of the best performances by
women on television. Indeed, the punchline
is obvious: There certainly are enough
roles to go around. But as politically problematic as the show could be—see also Jon
Krakauer’s Under the Banner of Heaven for
a hypnotic look at the most violent aspects
of breakaway, “fundamentalist Mormon”
polygamy—it’s jaw-dropping how strong
the female talent is in this cast. And it’s
an excellent example of the core three
actresses—Jeanne Tripplehorn as Barbara Henrickson, Chloë Sevigny as Nicki
Grant and Ginnifer Goodwin as Margene
Heffman—pushing each other to do better
work simply by example and making every
woman in the cast seem excellent.
Take the ever-weird Grace Zabriskie,
perhaps best known as Sarah Palmer,

* Directors often get all the credit

when it comes to great films, and great
TV shows are often seen as ensemble
pieces. But what about the actors who
help elevate a flick to classic status, or
the unsung stars who take a show to
the next level? Each month, Love Your
Work looks at the actors who rescued
a project from failure or added that
extra layer of awesomeness.

44

frail, touched mother of the doomed Laura Palmer on Twin Peaks. In Big Love, her
inherent oddness works in a completely
different direction as the semi-homicidal,
co-dependent Lois Henrickson, and she’s
a blast. Similarly excellent is Mary Kay
Place as Adaleen Grant, mother of Nicki
and one of polygamist compound leader
Roman Grant’s wives. Place’s best moments come in the show’s first two seasons, where she wears her queendom with
a sharp humor—she’s aware of the insanity of her situation, but accepts it with a
faith that’s as much bemused as humble.
Even Cassi Thomson, who plays Nicki’s
daughter Cara Lynn, has grown as an actress exponentially within a season.
The toughest part on the show might
be that of Barb Henrickson, the mainstream Mormon woman whose husband
convinces her to live the “principle” and
accept sister wives. Tripplehorn’s had a
varied and largely low-key career, from
sharp parts in big-name successes (Basic
Instinct, The Firm) to, well, Waterworld.
There wasn’t a lot of evidence that she
could anchor a crew quite like this, and
she has to do it as the Zeppo. When the
others are freaking out, Barb must remain
calm. When everyone gets to show their
emotions on their sleeve behind closed

doors, Barb must, at least until the end of
the fourth season, be the family’s public
face all the time. She is the one who believes in this lifestyle the least, and has to
run the show. She is Leo McGarry to Bill’s
President Bartlet, and she’s never been
quite sold on the administration’s goals
in the first place.
Sevigny’s accomplishment is even more
impressive. The former It Girl proved she
had chops to spare in the often unwatchably intense Boys Don’t Cry, but her work
on Big Love is rich and dynamic. Nicki
is a largely terrible human being, but an
enormously complicated one. She’s selfcentered, easily jealous, sheltered and
damaged in ways she still can’t fully comprehend. She’s conniving and more than

top Photo ron batzdorff, all others by lacey terrell

a little manipulative. But Sevigny’s
(L to R) Chloë Sevigny,
Jeanne Tripplehorn
ability to play such
and Ginnifer Goodwin.
a profoundly unlikeable woman
and still make her appealing (if not entirely
sympathetic) is a wonder to behold. A key
to her character comes in the first season.
In a scene as reflective of the show’s roots
in Westerns as anything else, Nicki’s father
sends her faintly terrifying brother Alby
to intimidate Bill’s family. Only Nicki is
brave enough to confront him—they have
guns and Hummers; she has nothing but
mother bear rage, and she scares them
off. You suddenly understand why Bill
married her—she’s made of iron. If Barb
is too mainstream Mormon and Margene

is essentially a civilian, Nicki is the prairie
wife who will go down shooting.
And what of Margene? Ginnifer Goodwin was the least known quantity when
the show launched in 2006, and as the
show winds down, she will leave with the
biggest skill set. Margene is an innocent,
a non-Mormon who babysat for the Henricksons and got caught up in the lifestyle.
She adores having this instant big family,
has an enormous heart and seems the
least sexually jealous of everyone in the
houses (perhaps because she’s the youngest). A people person in the purest sense,
she’s the one to reach out to neighbors and
assume the best in people, even if she is a
sucker for a Ponzi scheme. Goodwin’s able
to pull off the naif thing without seeming

truly dopey, embodying the old axiom that
there are plenty of smart people who aren’t
funny, but very few who are funny and not
smart. Her comic timing is spotless, easily the best on the program. It adds a layer of
wide-eyed intelligence
to Margene.
Three women, three
very different parts,
three stellar performances that make the
show hustle and flow.
Such is their strength
Big Love:
that the biggest mysThe Complete
tery is what they saw Fourth Season
is available on
in Bill Paxton in the
DVD from HBO
first place.
Home Video.
45

/movies

Fine Old Cannibals

The terrible truth of Soylent Green is still more haunting than hilarious / by Sean L. Maloney

S

poiler alert: It’s made out of people. Wait, no, it’s

soy-eating, unemployed layabouts.
Soylent Green’s New York is one of a radical disnot really a spoiler alert when you’re talking about
parity between rich and poor, where if you’re the
a cultural touchstone, is it? ’Cause, really, Phil
former, a beautiful woman is “furniture” that comes
Hartman would have to take more of the blame for with your high-end apartment, and if you’re the
spoiling the ending of 1973’s dystopian sci-fi clas- latter, you might just be lucky enough to sleep on
sic Soylent Green—Hartman’s impression of Char- someone’s staircase or one of the broken-down cars
lton Heston is one of the most classic gags from Saturday that clog the city streets like petrified traffic. The
desperate population subsists on processed proNight Live’s ’90s heyday. Or you can pawn fault off on Matt
tein wafers manufactured by the Soylent
Groening, as the titular human-protein sustenance
Corporation, which controls 50 percent
squares have been joke fodder for both The Simpsons
of the world’s food supply—think McDonald’s
meets Monsanto and Walmart, and
and Futurama. What we’re trying to say is that, basithen
they
turn up the evil just for shits and
cally, we didn’t spoil it, and, really, neither did they.
giggles—and there’s not even enough of the
All jokes aside, Soylent Green, based on
soy-saltines to go around. People are pissed.
the book Make Room! Make Room! by hard
Things are hectic.
sci-fi master Harry Harrison, is an intense
And Charlton Heston’s hard-boiled cop
exploration of the effects of overpopulaThorn—along with his awesome ascot—
Soylent Green
tion, environmental disaster and corpoare caught up in the middle, swept into
will be available
on Blu-ray
ratist plutocracy. Maybe it’s because the
the conspiracy to create crispy, crunchy
March 19 from
developing world is in the midst of Days of
people-crackers after a member of the elite
Warner Home
Video.
Rage—populist uprisings fueled by rising
is murdered. Thorn uncovers what’s basifood prices, sweeping unemployment and
cally the creepiest approach to keeping a
indifferent ruling classes have become an almost company—and a civilization—in the black with the
daily occurrence—but Soylent Green’s hypothesis
help of Sol Roth (Hollywood legend Edward G. Rob(freeze-dried cannibalism as a last-ditch effort to inson in his final role) as his roommate and research
save a species spun out of control) doesn’t seem too assistant. What the pair discovers is a haunting and
Charlton Heston
far gone. Hell, they nailed the fact that New York
foreboding reality that is only a few steps removed
(left) with Chuck
Connors
City would be overrun with unshaven, vest-wearing, from our own.

Sharktopus is the latest in a long and glorious line
of Roger Corman schlock / by Sean L. Maloney

W

e don’t know about art, but we know what we like—

specifically, watching bioengineered mutants devour
bikini-clad beach bunnies on a Saturday night. We’re
not afraid to admit that, while we may live in a city
chock to the brim with fine art, high culture and topnotch nightlife, we definitely stayed in to catch the premiere of Sharktopus on SyFy last fall. Let’s not mince words—we
are nerds and we have no shame about shirking off socialization
to watch something incredibly silly.

Sure, we set our DVR so we’d have it
for posterity, and it’s not like we’ve never
seen a Roger Corman-produced monster
movie, but there was no way we would
actually wait to watch a half-shark/halfoctopus killing machine raging through a
Mexican resort town. In this time-shifted
era, most things can wait—a movie about a
killer shark with deadly tentacles cannot.
Heck, it might have been the most important television event in a generation. Well,
for us anyway.
We can’t say exactly why we found
Sharktopus so compelling when recent
years have been glutted with compositeanimal made-for-TV monster movies:
2010 also saw Corman bring Dinoshark
and Dinocroc vs Supergator to the small
48

screen, plus there was the rather prodigious output of Corman-style knock-off
studio the Asylum, which brought us
Mega-Piranha, Mega-Shark vs Giant Octopus, Mega-Shark vs Crocosaurus and
2010: Moby Dick.
Which... really, that’s just a ridiculous
idea, even for us. Ahab pilots a nuclear
submarine? Talk about a stretch—an even
bigger stretch than, say, believing that
Sharktopus star Eric Roberts is supposed
to be a scientific genius. Thirty years ago
it might have been a possibility, but these
days Roberts comes off so stoned that he
makes Keith Richards look cogent.
Then again, we’re not tuning into watch
Eric Roberts stumble through his lines—
has anyone, ever? We’re tuning into to

watch a carnage-packed
cheese-fest, which is exactly what we get. Yes,
the plot is flimsy at best,
the acting is, uh, not going to win anybody any
awards anytime soon,
and the special effects
Sharktopus
are special in the shortwill be
bus sense, but none of
available
that matters—every few
March 15 from
Anchor Bay
minutes a half-sharkEntertainment..
half-octopus-freakshow eats somebody.
That’s the important thing—the script
could be entirely made up of quotes from
Whitney Port’s Facebook page and we’d
totally be into it, just as long as someone’s
blood is splattered all over sand at least
once every, say, five minutes. Again, we’re
talking about a mutant-shark-octopus
chimera on a killing spree—it’s not exactly what you’d call high-concept, but it’s
a concept that will still be fun long after
folks get over Oscar-baiting ballerinas,
stuttering monarchs and socially inept
social-networking tycoons. It’s a shark
with tentacles for crying out loud!

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/movies

Hillbilly Heaven

O

essay by

Stan
Michna

h, boy. Only after watching The Wild And Wonderful

Whites Of West Virginia, director Julien Nitzberg’s
disturbingly brilliant and jaw-dropping documentary
on the raucous White family clan of Boone County,
West Virginia, do you identify the response gnawing away
at you throughout: It’s dismay.
Knowing Johnny Knoxville (of Jackass and Wild
Boyz rednecksploitation notoriety) served as executive
producer explains it somewhat. (The Whites may be wild,
but they’re hardly wonderful, jaunty title notwithstanding.) And certainly his divisive reputation contributed to
the torrents of vitriol and rancour that flooded the blogosphere when this film first hit the festival circuit.
But what ultimately strikes home is the realization
that families similar to the Whites inhabit virtually every
hamlet, town and big city in North America and, unless
you live in a hermetically sealed plastic bubble, you encounter them one way or another almost every day. It’s
just that camera crews don’t follow them around for a
year to celebrate—and celebrate they do, if surreptitiously—their drug-and-“alky-hol”-fuelled outlaw lifestyle.
Though they refer to themselves as outlaw hillbillies, the Whites, strictly
speaking, are neither hillbillies (like the fictional Ma & Pa Kettle or The
Beverly Hillbillies, who are from the Ozarks); nor coonass rednecks (from
Louisiana); nor piney woods crackers (à la Deliverance Georgians). They’re
Appalachian mountain folk smack in the middle of coal country, where for
decades absentee coal barons have beheaded, drawn, quartered and gutted
the landscape and kept generations of locals in perpetual poverty and virtual
servitude. (There is a brief but telling segment in which a memorial service
honours workers killed in various mining disasters over the years, followed
by the annual Coal Festival parade, where children scramble in the gutters for
cheap candies tossed from the parade floats.)
The Whites, though, long ago figured out how to stay out of the mines. As
various prosecutors, law enforcement officials and otherwise upstanding Boone
County citizens recount in the opening frames (and interject
elsewhere), the Whites manage to sustain themselves in a variety of enterprises that include, but are not limited to: theft,
armed robbery, murder, fraud, embezzlement and drug trafficking. Like their distant ancestors, the borderers of northern England and Scottish lowlands, the Whites rely on their
closely-knit extended family to survive by whatever craft and
cunning necessary in a world where power, wealth and influence are forever beyond reach.
The Wild and
At least that’s one way to look at it.
Wonderful
Another way is to call ‘em as you see ‘em: a menacing, noWhites of
West Virginia
account brood of rifle-slinging, knife-wielding, beer-swilling,
is available
drug-snorting, gasoline-huffing white trash rednecks. Their
now from
lives, as depicted here, are like a surreal, 20-car pileup unfoldTribeca Film
distributed by
ing before your eyes, a tragi-comic, chain-reaction punctuated
Entertainment
by spatters of blood—beginning with patriarch D. Ray White,
One.
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a renowned Appalachian tap-and-step dancer once
profiled in a documentary called Talking Feet,
murdered in 1985 while on his way to a gig.
Of the three principals who form the spine of the
documentary, it’s D. Ray’s son, Jesco, also a dancer
and similarly profiled in the 1991 PBS documentary
Dancing Outlaw—wherein
he famously tells of putting
a knife to his wife’s throat
because he’s sick and tired of
“runny and slah-my eggs” for
breakfast—who is the most
magnetic, if not likeable. A
badass with side-by-side
tattoos of Elvis and Charles
Manson, he provides one of
the film’s more poignant moments as he strolls through
the family cemetery, pointing to the stones marking his
murdered father, a murdered
sister, and a brother who committed suicide, then struggling to express the existential meaning of it all.
Saddest and clearly the most controversial is a
sequence featuring Jesco’s niece, Kirk (she stabbed
her husband, by the way; what else is new?) who
with a friend crushes and snorts lines of hillbilly
heroin in her hospital room, where just a few feet
away her newborn baby sleeps. When state authorities seize her baby, a distraught Kirk—except for uncle Poney who hightailed it to Minnesota, she’s the
only White expressing a desire for a better life for
her offspring—admits herself to a drug rehab centre,
a milestone celebrated with a high-octane, boobflashing, drugs-and-liquor going-away party.
But to emphasize moments of genuine pathos
would be misleading. More representative are those
precious moments when one of the younger Whites
is sentenced to 50 years in prison for shooting an
uncle—who survived and still loves the boy, God
bless him—three times in the face; or the crackhead
who drops his pants and wags his weenie in front of
his squealing-with-laughter aunt; or the tattooist
who can’t spell; or learning that D.Ray had his whole
family declared insane, thus ensuring a flow of government entitlement cheques and the right to fuss,
fight and party even unto the final generation.
Daddy always knew best after all.
Questions or comments?
Email stan@sunriserecords.com

Abducted
Accused at 17
Adventures of a Teenage
Dragonslayer
Akane Iro Ni Somaru Saka:
Complete Collection
Alien From the Deep
Ambassador: The Complete Series
Aphrodisiac! The Sexual Secret of
Marijuana
Around a Small Mountain
Asia: Spirit of the Night – The Phoenix
Tour Live in Cmabridge
Atlas: Uncovering Earth
Away All Boats
Babysitters Beware
Backyardigans: We Arrr Pirates
Bestia
Big Night
Billy Joel: Live at Shea Stadium
Bionic Everafter?
Black Butler: Season One, Part Two
Bob Dylan: Constant Sorrow

Mar
8
Four Lions

Directed by Chris Morris
The mainstreaming of
“terrorist comedy” has thus
far only extended to Jeff
Dunham’s thuddingly unfunny
Achmed puppet. Four Lions
gave it a valiant go last year,
but failed to break out of
the indie ghetto. Here, U.K.
first-time director Chris
Morris follows four bumbling
jihadists in Sheffield.
Critically beloved, and
deservedly so.
Bon Jovi: Blaze of Glory
British Metal
Butchers
Caja Negra
Care Bears: 4 Feature Set
Carrera Perdida
Cazador De La Bruja: The Complete
Series
Chilly Thrillers: Dead of Winter/
Frozen in Fear/Disturbed/
Interview With a Serial Killer
Clifford’s Puppy Days: 4 Feature Set
Climate Change: Our Planet – The
Arctic Story
Colin Mochrie & Brad Sherwood:
Two Man Group
Dalziel & Pascoe: Season 3
Daniel Tosh: Happy Thoughts
Dark Skies: The Complete Series
David Murray: Saxophone Man
Doctor Who: Seeds of Doom
Doctor Who: The Ark
Doodlebops: 4 Feature Set
Dragonball Z Kai: Season One, Part 4
Eddie Ifft Live
Elina Garanca: New Year’s Eve 2010
Every Day
Exploitation Cinema: Supervan/
Jailbait Babysitter
Exploitation Cinema: Where Time
Began/Encounter With the
Unknown
Film Unfinished
First Turn On
Four Lions
Frank Sinatra: A Man and His Music
From Within
Great Title Fights of the ‘70s & ‘80s
Grim
Hannah Montana: Forever – The
Final Season
Harry & Son
Haunting of Marsten Manor/
Haunted From Within
Heart: Night at Sky Church
Helena From the Wedding
High Anxiety

100 Years That Shook the World
13 Stripes to 50 Stars: The Growth
of America
Abbott & Costello
Absent
Alfred Hitchcock: The Master of the
Macabre
Andy Griffith Show
Arctic Mission: The Great Adventure
Babylon 5: The Movies
Bailey’s Big Back Yard: The Tropical
Rainforest
Baker Boys: Inside the Surge
Barbie: A Fairy Secret
Barney: Mother Goose Collection
Basic/S.W.A.T.
Batman: The Brave and the Bold –
Season One, Part Two
Battle of Britain
Be My Teacher
Best Food Ever
Best of Spaghetti Westerns
Beverly Hillbillies 1962-1963
Blood
BMX Bandits
Boat House Detectives

MAR
22
Katy Perry—The Girl
Who Ran Away

Out via Sexy Intellectual
Studios, so you know it’s going
to be quality. Have fun with
this unauthorized DVD bio,
which tracks Perry’s unlikely
rise from teen Christianpopper to girl-kissin’/teenage
dreamin’ megastar. “Rare
archive footage” is promised,
and should be hilarious.
Candlelight in Algeria
Century of Flight: 100 Years of
Aviation
Chaperone
Charles Bronson
Chicago Calling
Chihuahua
Child in the House
Clannad
Coach: The Fourth Season
Complete Civil War
Con Artist
D. Gray-Man: Season Two
Dangerous Intimacy: The Untold
Story of Mark Twain’s Final Years
Dinosaur Train: Pteranodon Family
World Tour Adventure
Exploring Alaska: The Great Outdoors
Fast Track
Fighter
Food Wars Season 1
Footloose/Flashdance
Franny’s Feet: Home Sweet Home
Freestyle
Gamera vs. Zigra/Gamera, Super
Monster
Gamines
Grave Digger: Clans Will Rise Again
Great Battles of WW2
Gunslinger Girl: The Complete Series
With OVA
Hemingway’s Garden of Eden
Hereafter
Hidden Love
Hiromi: Solo – Live at Blue Note NY
Hitler’s Defeat
Hollywood Comedy Classics
Hollywood Westerns Collection
Home Before Dark
Horror Classics
Hour of 13
House of Mirth/Les Miserables
How the USA Grew: 13 Colonies to
50 States
Human Trace
I Shouldn’t Be Alive: Season 3
In Shanghai
Indochine
Interplanetary

2012 and the Shift: The Power of
Ceremony
4 Movie Marathon: The Perfect Man/
Head Over Heels/Wimbledon/The
Story of Us
AC/DC: The Interview Sessions
Adventures of a Teenage
Dragonslayer
Adventures of Ma and Pa Kettle
Volume 1
Adventures of Ma and Pa Kettle
Volume 2
Affluenza
Air
Alien 2 OnEarth
America’s Wars
Animal Atlas: Family Time
Anywhere U.S.A.
Associate
Bashment: The Fork in the Road
Bat
Battle of Los Angeles
Bedrooms

Colin James returns with Take It From The Top:
The Best Of a collection of the 15 most essential
rock tracks from his impressive multi-label career,
featuring hits like "Just Came Back" and "Why’d
You Lie," along with two new songs recorded this
month with legendary producer Bob Rock (Bon Jovi,
The Tragically Hip, Metallica, Michael Buble).

Featuring the single "It’s Gonna Be Alright"
co-written by Colin, the first of two new tracks fits
perfectly on this album as it destined to become
one of Colin's finest rock performances to date. The
other new recording is a cover of the Buddy Miles
song "Them Changes," in which Colin honours this
classic, yet brings his own unique flavour to the
arrangement.

Available March 15th

www.colinjames.com
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MARCH Tour
13
15
16
17
18
19
20
22
23
24
25
26

London, ON
Meaford, ON
Drayton, ON
Bayfield, ON
Hamilton, ON
Oakville, ON
Guelph, ON
Belleville, ON
Quebec City, QC
L’assomption, QC
St-Hyacinthe, QC
Sherbrooke, QC

In addition to housing the Beastie Boys’ recording studio and post-production facility, Oscilloscope Laboratories
became a full-fledged independent film distribution company three years ago when launched by Adam Yauch
of the Beastie Boys. With such films as Michel Gondry’s personal family documentary, The Thorn In The Heart,
the re-release of Jules Dassin’s classic The Law, Lance Daly’s award-winning Irish film
Kisses, and the upcoming Howl starring James Franco as Allen Ginsberg, Oscilloscope
has quickly asserted its place amongst the ranks of American independent film distributors.
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When You’re Through
Thinking, Say Yes!
Featuring the new single
For You, And Your Denial
AVAILABLE IN STORES MARCH 22ND

ALSO AVAILABLE
AMON AMARTH

AS BLOOD RUNS BLACK
Instinct

Before The Night Takes Us

Street Date: 3/29/11

Street Date: 3/15/11

Street Date: 3/15/11

Surtur Rising

ACROSS THE SUN

VARIOUS

Ragga Ragga Ragga 2011

Street Date: 3/15/11

PHAROAHE MONCH
W.A.R.

THE HUMAN ABSTRACT
Digital Veil

WIZ KHALIFA

Deal Or No Deal

Marketed & Distributed in Canada by Entertainment One Canada
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CANNIBAL CORPSE

Global Evisceration (DVD)

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Canadian
Essential Music

True North Records presents

Bruce

Cockburn
S mall Source of Co mfort

The brilliant new studio album from Bruce Cockburn
featuring 15 new songs including “Call me Rose”
*AVAILABLE March 8

The

WAILIN’ JENNYS
Bright Morning Stars

“One of the most exciting and polish acts in folk music”
- Dirty Linen Magazine
*AVAILABLE February 8

After nearly four years The Wailin’ Jennys are back with Bright Morning
Stars, a melodically and lyrically lush collection of 13 tracks which is one of
the most anticipated new folk albums of the year.

THE MAHONES

THE BLACK IRISH
“The Black Irish will be hard to beat this year as the #1 album of the year in
Celt Rock & Punk! Pick up your copy people!”- Paddyrock.com
Raise your pints! The Mahones are back with The Black Irish, a brand new
album filled with Celtic punk anthems.
Catch The Mahones on tour across Canada beginning in Feb/March 2011.
*AVAILABLE March 1
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!
S
I
H
T
R
E
V
O
DISCew Albums You Need…
Four N

STRIPPERS UNION THE DEUCE

Strippers Union is the band led by Rob Baker and Craig Northey. Poised to assail the world of rock with their own
“mass of awesomeness” in sophomore opus The Deuce, Stripper’s Union are no strangers to the importance of a
band being greater than the sum of its parts. Rob Baker and Craig Northey have spent immeasurable amounts of
time traipsing the Great White North in revered acts such as The Tragically Hip and The Odds respectively. Pulling
fellow conspirators Doug Elliott (bass guitar) and Pat Steward (drums) from Northey’s former outt, the foundation
of Stripper’s Union is an impenetrable dynamo of intensity, musicality and vision. Includes the rst single “Making
Strange”. Available March 8 2011.

PJ HARVEY LET ENGLAND SHAKE

PJ Harvey’s new album, Let England Shake, was recorded in a 19th Century church in Dorset, on a cliff-top overlooking
the sea. It was created with a cast of musicians including such long-standing collaborators as Flood (Depeche Mode,
U2, The Killers), John Parish (Eels, Tracy Chapman) and Mick Harvey (Nick Cave And The Bad Seeds). Let England Shake
marks Harvey’s 8th album, following 2007’s White Chalk. Its songs centre on both her home country, and events further
aeld in which it has embroiled itself. The lyrics return, time and again, to the matter of war, the fate of people ghting
and events separated by whole ages - from Afghanistan to Gallipoli. The album is not a work of protest but brims with the
mystery and magnetism in which she excels. Put simply, not many people make records like this. Let England Shake is
“Ethereal and brutal, it’s simply stunning” – Q. Available Now.

ALEXANDER ALEXANDER

Alexander is Alex Ebert, lead singer and musical mastermind behind Edward Sharpe & The Magnetic Zeros.
During breaks from touring with the Zeros over the past year, Alexander began building and recording the pieces
that would become the songs for this album alone in his bedroom. Before this album, all of the music he worked
on had been collaborative, especially with the 10-person Magnetic Zeros. “I wanted to be able to build an album
basically with my hands, like building a house by myself,” Alexander remarked of his inspiration for making this album without outside help. Alexander’s self-titled record is complete with ten songs sure to please fans of Edward
Sharpe & The Magnetic Zeros while welcoming new listeners with open arms. Available Now.

G. LOVE FIXIN’ TO DIE

After touring with Seth and Scott Avett (the Avett Brothers) and discovering a mutual love for back road blues, G.
Love invited them not only to perform on his new record but produce it as well. The result is Fixin’ To Die, a collection of rearranged traditionals, a classic cover, and a slew of G. Love originals all sharing a common goal: to strip
away all pretense and capture the original spirit and sound G. Love has cultivated over his entire career but never
fully embraced until now. Available Now.

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debut album

Don't Miss:

featuring the hits:
Break It Up
Skeletons
We All Fall Down and
Jumpstart!